


The Call of the Void

by pikunxu



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Banter, Ben hasn't joined the Dark Side, DEFINITELY subject to rating change, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Jedi Masters AU, Reylo - Freeform, Romance, Slow Burn, You've been warned, read and find out (;, when i say slow burn i mean it, yet(?)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-10 08:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5578951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikunxu/pseuds/pikunxu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Lay beside me, tell me what they've done<br/>Speak the words I wanna hear, to make my demons run<br/>The door is locked now, but it's opened if you're true<br/>If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you"</p><p>Rey trades in her empty, repetitive waiting game on Jakku for monsoons and lightsabers in a Jedi temple on an archipelago planet parsecs from the backwater planet of her youth. Here she trains under the tutelage of a force-sensitive dynasty. Her destiny, and that of the balance of the force however, becomes shaped by factors no amount of training could ever have prepared her for... </p><p>Jedi Masters AU<br/>Subject to rating change as chapters progress</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stay - Hans Zimmer

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Star Wars fanfiction, despite being total trash for the franchise since I was but a wee knee-high lass. Credits for inspiration go to the fabulous arbutus-blossoms for their beautiful tumblr fanart and Mster70 for their hilarious yet touching Jedi AU fic. Seriously, go check it out. Keep on keeping it real, y'all.
> 
> The quote in the summary is from The Unforgiven II by Metallica. All three Unforgiven songs are my one true Reylo inspiration. Your emo trash son agrees. The title of the work is a translation of the french expression "l'appel du vide" which is the little voice inside your head that tells you to jump from high places. I liked this because the force is always the little voice inside your head, pulling towards the unknown. The chapter titles are comparatively meaningless, just the title of whatever song I listened to on repeat while writing. Generally pretty solid background music for the chapter though.

The sun over Jakku paces across the sky arduously slow, circling tirelessly like a vulture hungry for the fallen. Rey can feel the sweat pooling on her arms- water that her body can’t afford to lose. She winds ragged scraps of thin grey fabric up to her shoulders, struggling to trap the liquid inside her. The coverings feel sticky and humid, but it’s better than shriveling up from scorched skin and dehydration in the blistering wasteland she reluctantly calls home.

She abandons her speeder in the dunes, scrambling up the windblown sands to reach the old star destroyer, cresting up out of the waves of orange. She’s slipping backward, her hands unable to find purchase anywhere while the white-hot grains run tantalizingly fluid through her grasp. Finally, she manages to finish her scramble.  
  
From here, Rey can see out to the horizon is all directions, but never beyond. There’s not the faintest promise of water clinging to the fiery breeze that rubs its muzzle against her skin, not even the furthest mountains beyond kelvin ridge are masked by humidity. Her entire world is a capsulized visual field, dotted with wind-worn durasteel carcasses. 

There’s nothing she hasn’t seen before and Rey turns to the dark of the star destroyer, careful not to graze her skin across the heated metal exterior before dropping into the deceptively cool belly of the fallen beast. She fishes in old compartments and even the ones that had seemed well sealed off have a dusting of rusty orange grains coating the surfaces of everything within. Rey always hopes for rust, because where there’s rust there is surely water.  
  
There’s only ever dust and sand.  
Always sand.  
  
The only good that comes from the ever-present sand and dryness, Rey figures, is all the small treasures she unearths are left perfectly preserved. She clips herself to the underside of an old wall, turned sideways and now more the underside of a bridge jetting out over the chasm bellow. Her feet dangle in the void as her fingers deftly motion to pry open the panel of a fuse box.  
  
Inside she finds four thermal stabilization coils, a common find to scavenge off life support systems. Thirty years old but not entirely obsolete. She hopes to collect at least three portions for the lot. She dances her tongue across the leads, satisfied with the tingly jolts the dissipated charges leave pulsing in her head. The wiring is still intact. She drops them into her satchel.  
  
Rey swings her feet to gain momentum as she moves from one handhold to another, across the chasm. The interior of the crippled starship is growing fainter and redder as the sun lowers her head to kiss the necks of the silhouetted mesas dotting the skyline. She has to hurry if she’s going to reach the Niima Outpost by nightfall.

When Rey arrives at her destination, the brightest stars are already dotting the pink and purple sky. She drags her netting behind her in the sand, the strain of the weight nearly unmanageable with her bone thin figure. No one looks in her direction.  
  
Unkar Plutt is getting ready to close the shop for the day and Rey sighs, knowing this is the worst time she could have come.  
  
“Rey, _mah emeela_!” His sausage link fingers pry up the barred wire barrier only just enough for her to slip the parts underneath.  
  
“Those slime cretonnes were ousted from this backwater junk heap years ago, I didn’t think anyone would be happier to see them go than you,” She slings what she has to barter up on the counter as she says it.

“Old habits die hard, child. You’ll understand if you ever find your way out of here.”

“And let you try to sell me as labor to the Bartokk hivemind again I think I’ll take my chances out here on the beach, thank you.”  
  
“Aww, no hard feelings, it’s only business!”  
  
“And that’s the only reason I’m here today. What can you give me for these?” Rey watches as he picks the little metal cylinders up in his hands, twisting them to looks for scratches, dents, anything he could use to knock the price down.

“I’ll give you a half portion for each.”

“Two portions? Last week they were a portion each!” Rey narrows her eyes and as the markets empty out and the streets get more quietly vacant she knows now isn’t the best time for a small scavenger girl to go picking fights. She grabs her meager meal and storms off.

At the center of the square is the old well, connected to a vanishing aquifer deep below the scorching surface. The water is too bacteria-laden on it’s own to drink, but Rey doesn’t have money for clean water more the less an evaporator or iodine tablets so she has to distill the water herself.  
  
She ties her net back onto her clunky old speeder, shoving her staff and water bladders inside. She’s getting ready to leave when she spies Plutt again, milling around in the old Niima junk yard next to one of the finest starships she’s see on Jakku in years. She squints to snag a better glimpse in the fading twilight, and notices that the ship has no Imperial markings on the hull. The construction is classic: white hulls and painted decals instead of honed metal trimmings. It’s not her place to get involved, the situation is likely nothing out of the ordinary parts dealings she’s seen a million times over and moves to light the ignition on her speeder. 

But somewhere within the darkest corners of the psyche, the tiny voice that whispers to her where to step in the crumbling wreckage, the one that calls out desperately to her when she looks up at the stars at night, pulls her closer to the two men talking to Plutt like a starship slipping through time at the edges of a black hole’s gravity. She caves to her curiosity, hiding behind some discarded pressurized shipping containers for sensitive cargo and eyes the unusual strangers.  
  
The two men are dressed in antiquated looking canvas robes, too heavy to be comfortable in the desert heat. The older one has thickly matted grey hair and beard but it looks as though it might have been a sandy blonde color in his younger days. His bright blue eyes are focused but his wrinkles leave a tired expression on his face, clearly displeased at whatever Plutt is spouting on about. His skin is leathered, like hers, the mark of someone who spent years on the outer rim desert planets, but she doesn’t recognize him. His arms are crossed over his chest, tucked inside the draping beige of his wide, canvas sleeves.  
  
The younger one looks a few years older than her, dressed in dark brown robes with black, hand-hewn leather straps around his waist and boots. Sweltering, no doubt, but at least they’d keep out the sun and sand. His expression seems a lot more distressed, and he keeps running his hands through his shaggy black hair, long face and dark eyes glaring pointedly at Plutt before allowing his attention to dart all about the scrap yard, decidedly unimpressed.  
  
As suddenly as he began, he freezes. Rey watches the corner of his face quirk in the slightest curiosity before his head whips around to pin her under his piercing glare. Rey wants to look away, but it’s too late to hide now. She swallows hard and his expression bores holes straight into her. She doesn’t dare twitch a muscle, a desert jackal, snared in a predator’s trap. She prays he has the prudence to keep his mouth shut. He does, but his stare never wavers. Plutt leaves, frustrated.

“You’ve got something to say, sand rat? Or are you here to try and strip the ship for parts?” He calls out to her, and is glad that Plutt is just barely out of earshot. Rey stands up, but doesn’t move to leave the relative safety that the polycarbonate alloy canisters and the distance supply. The old man spies her.  
  
“Hush, Ben!” He casts a sidelong glance at his black clad companion- Ben, she files away the information. “Have I taught you nothing that you must always presume the worst of people?”  
  
“I’m sorry, Master,” Ben says this, but she’s fairly certain he’s going through the motions as she sees his posture stays stiff and he bites the inside of his mouth. He clearly doesn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. That’s a fair assessment; at this rate she doesn’t much trust him either. She contemplates leaving, but now that she’s opened the conversation, that likely wouldn’t be the most judicious of actions either.

“He’s lying to you,” Rey interjects before he has the opportunity to further contemplate the possibility she’s here with ill intentions. “He always lies on his repairs estimates, especially to people looking for passage back to the inner core systems. He assumes they have more money than the standard cantina flies and bounty hunters. Let me guess, he told you something was wrong with the ion flux stabilization component of the binary motivator?”  
  
“Yes, something like that,” The “Master” looks back at Ben with an expression that can only be read as _I told you so_.

“Typical. He knows humans usually have no understanding of binary and astromech droids don’t exactly run cheap in these parts. If you’d let me take a look, I might be able to pin point your real troubles,” Rey explains.  
  
She treads carefully in the situation, but The Master seems to be a gentle sort even if his companion seems far more calculating and severe. She wants to help. Not to be a good person, as that’s rarely a wise motivation in a food chain as unforgiving as Jakku’s, but should she succeed, she might be able to undermine Plutt and make a few square meals in the process. Much better than a day’s work scavenging.  
  
The Master motions that she follow him onto the bridge of the ship and she does, Ben closely nipping at her heels. She’s worried to make even the slightest of jostling movements with him behind her. She fires up a diagnostic control panel on the starboard side of the internal hull. She’s running standard troubleshooting programming while she lets her eyes wander the interior.  
  
Despite the ship’s impressive exterior, the interior trappings are reasonably humble. The small central room where they’re standing has a simple table and booth, lit with soft ambient lighting that wouldn’t be too distracting to the pilot as the cockpit, complete with two pilot’s chairs, was merely attached to this room by a tight corridor. There was a kitchen nook instead of a galley, and three blast doors which she assumed lead to the pilot and crew quarters, as well as the ‘fresher. There wasn’t even a gunner’s nest.  
  
Sparks crack through the system and the side of the ship groans and vibrates under the strain of some seemingly impossible calibration. She aborts the diagnostic and pries off a quarter panel over the wiring hiding the vast majority of the thundering racket.  
  
“Your positive phi-inverted stabilizer looks like it’s been through the wash, how old even are these parts? Please tell me that you didn’t arrive on this planet coming in hot out of lightspeed.” She pries the pieces out of the wall, noting the light pouring in from a hole in the external hull. “Looks like you’ve sustained some pretty heavy damage to the exterior of the ship as well, the life support systems were probably laboring to keep this girl afloat as long as she was. You’re lucky you even made it to this junkyard alive.”  
  
“Can you fix it?” Ben says this, he’s sitting at the table looking up at something apparently captivating on the ceiling instead of at her.  
  
“Of course, I can fix anything,” Rey lets a momentary surge of pride flow through her before her face hardens at her next thought.  
  
“The parts will be difficult to find though. There are no legitimate starship parts dealers for parsecs out in these reaches of the galaxy, only salvage yards like this one. Some of the x-wing wreckage may have had a few, but any intact would likely have been picked clean at this point. With some finesse, I might be able to reroute the stabilization protocols through the gyroscopic stabilization mechanics, but they’ll be labored at the expense. Take it nice and easy and you’ll be able to coast back into the inner core without tailspinning in hyperspace. You can get some more permanent repairs there. I’ll need to find a few switcher circuits for the wiring and a trivalve cooling assembly to alleviate the extra strain on the gyros. Regardless, I’ll need pay a visit to the rebel wreckage seeing as this starship will be incompatible with imperial grade parts. It’s a day’s journey from here.”  
  
Ben looks at her as though she’s speaking Mandalorian tongues, but the Master seems to have eaten up every word she said. He nods slowly.

“Ben, go with the girl,” The statement is clearly an order but he takes it was though it were a question.  
  
“What? No! We’ve been here far to long all ready the First Order will-“  
  
“Will be here as soon as they track us to the outpost, which is why I need you to go with- what is your name?”

“Rey, Sir.” She can’t help but crack a smile.

“Yes, go with Rey to retrieve the parts as quickly as possible. Would be a pity for her to be intercepted in the badlands, trapping us here, wouldn’t you agree my _young padawan_?” The old man raises a eyebrow.  
  
“Yes, Master. Of course, Master. Anything you wish, Master,” Ben’s voice is laced with sarcasm, but Rey gets the impression that despite his cheeky response, the exchange has an air of camaraderie behind it. She chuckles, despite herself, and catches an unamused look in response.

“Daylight is burning, sand rat, are we leaving or not?” Ben calls after her before ducking out the bridge.  


 

 

 

 


	2. Mountains - Hans Zimmer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to publish this last night but I got drunk instead: an autobiography

The sun has sunk behind the horizon and two moons circle the sky littered with infinite pinpricks of light, a line of near white cutting a stripe across the indigo heavens marking the galaxy’s inner core. Twilight still clings desperately to the landscape and shadows in the graveyard of starship parts dance deceptively over the sands.   
  
“Daylight isn’t just burning, it’s gone. We’ll have to move fast,” Rey cuts ahead of Ben’s stride, leading him to her speeder. She uses her makeshift sleeves to clean off the control panel, already amassing a thin layer of settled dust in the short hours she was away.

“It’s dangerous to travel at night in these parts, the sandstorms are unpredictable and the raiders’ ambuscades wait on the dunes of kelvin ridge for travelers who don’t know better. We’ll have to make an exception though,” Rey sighs, tugging on the ignition systems once, twice, third time is the charm before the sand swirls around her legs and the engine seethes and roars, the languishing electric beast surging out of its slumber.

“She only seats one…” Rey climbs up on to the saddle, bent head down over the windshield, pulling her makeshift goggles over her eyes. Not ideal for steering in the fading light, but not many options to keep out the kicked up sand. “Watch you’re hands the exhaust systems—“  
  
“AARRRGGHHH!!” Ben cries out when his hand brushes the rusted protrusions coming off the rear. 

“Get hot. Here, put your feet on the kicks,” Rey motions to the steel pipes poking out of either side of the speeder, just behind her own feet. Ben places his hands on the dash, arms resting on either side of her head on her shoulders, clearly reluctant to hold on to her but she can feel his weight resting on her back. It’s not going to be the most comfortable journey.   
  
The propulsion rings in her ears and they jet off in a flash swerving past the marketplace and on through a field of evaporators.

“Force alive, could you have come any closer to those tin cans?” She feels Ben burry his head in her back as she bobs and weaves at lightning speed through the farmland.

“Who’s the pilot here?” Rey throttles forward, just to spite him. “Keep your head down, unless of course you want to be blinded from corneal sand abrasion." 

Ben isn’t exactly inclined to casual conversation, and Rey finds herself a bit thankful for the amicable silence. She enjoys piloting the speeder, letting go of herself, disembodied in the speed and reflex of the flight across the sand. She adopts a zen focus, leaning her weight into the curves of the lowland as she moves. Three hours into their journey, chasing the setting sun towards the west, and she’s finally getting into her grove when she spies the building clouds of sand just beyond the buttes.   
  
“Shit…” Rey swallows and banks a hard right. Ben looks up for the first time in ages.

“Where are we going now?” He says, miffed as he grabs her waist, trying to resist the momentum tugging him off with her turn.

“There’s no way we can fly through that,” Rey nods in the direction of the sandstorm, as it edges dangerously close because of their flighty speed and the winds carrying the billows.   
  
“Well try to, there’s no time to waste!” Ben growls at her.

“Do you have a death wish?” Rey scolds back. She looks at the compass shimming on the dash, glancing up at the indistinguishable stars to try to discern how far she is from her nest inside the AT-AT. She never wanted to bring him there, the simplicity of her humble living situation is embarrassing to say the least, but at the rate the storm is barreling down on them she doesn’t have much of a choice.

“Hold on…” Rey tells him, flooring the propulsion systems right as the whipping winds nip at their heels and overtake them. She’s blind now, but for the blue glow of the dash. She has nothing to navigate on but instinct, her chest tightening with nerves as she hears Ben’s lungs hacking and heaving to expel the sand. Finally, they’re close enough for the metal detectors to pick out the shape of the AT-AT beneath them and she kills the engines, grabbing his forearm to heave him into the virtually buried hollow she’s carved out of the sands.   
  
The dirt chases them over the threshold before Rey slams the door shut, flipping on the soft glow of the white lights she fastened haphazardly to the pseudo-ceiling. Ben’s hacking doesn’t abate and he groans, leaning against the back paneling, rubbing the sand out of his face.   
  
Ben opens his eyes, blinking out the grains and strains to see, spying the polyplex tubing, winding down from outside the hovel in the corner and dripping water into a makeshift basin. He scrambles over desperately, looking for water to quench the burning in his throat.

“Don’t drink that, it’ll make you sick!” Rey slaps his hands away, spilling precious water in the process.   
  
“What’d you do that for? It’s distilled isn’t it?” Ben writhes against the wall as he croaks out his plea.

“Give me that bottle,” Rey gestures to a glass jar filled with lightly colored sand on a makeshift shelf. She fills two lenses with shattered reflective backings with water. Ben hands her the sand and she dumps clumps of it into the sorry excuses for cups.

“I thought you just cleaned that water!” He grips the bridge of his nose, but sucks down the murky fluid nonetheless, sighing at the relief as it meets his burning lips.   
  
“I did, but you can’t drink it straight like that. The distillation process removes the natural mineral content of the water as well as the bacteria. Without it, your body loses its ability to retain water. Without water retention, you dehydrate. You dehydrate, you die. You die, I leave your sorry body behind to mummify in the Jakku sands so quit your bitching and drink the damn water.” Rey spoons another collection of water into two shallow dishes, fishing her portions out of the folds of her robes as she talks.   
  
“Alright, alright… You know the desert better than I do.”

She dumps the periwinkle portion dust into the dishes, letting it conglomerate into the illusion of bread, blue and unappetizing in smell. She hands him one of the dishes. 

“I’m not hungry,” He turns his nose up at the offering, clearly without comprehension of the magnitude of generosity that such a gesture carries out here. Rey resists the twitch of rage in her face, reminding herself that despite his cocky manners he’s still a foreigner. 

“Eat it, you need to keep your strength up,” She resolves not to argue further, scarfing down her own meager rations. Ben eats the food, and doesn’t speak again for a long time. The winds howl ceaselessly outside the metal exterior, shaking with the force of the abrasion. Rey curls up into her sleeping corner, clutching the shreds of her solitary wool blanket to her form. 

* * *

  
Under the wavering, salvaged white lights Ben examines the humble trappings of her makeshift home. On the shelves lie a small collection of spare parts, screwdrivers, a multimeter, and a petite hand crafted doll. His fingers graze the figure in the darkness, tracing the rebel alliance insignia emblazoned on her breast.   
  
There’s a resistance helmet on the floor under his feet as well, the yellow decals scratched with the wear of time. Ben wipes the dust off the visor, thinking about the matching one he kept sacred in his room at home, dreaming of an era of heroes and villains, an era of truth and mythological impossibility where good always triumphed over evil. He sets the helmet back on the floor where he found it.   
  
Ben’s fingers wander the scraped markings etched into the ceiling and walls of the inside of the claustrophobic compartments, listening to the crying wind beyond the blast doors. A howling sungwa, hungry for it’s mother. Is that how he saw her? Helpless, waiting?   
  
The hours wane and the blustering subsides, and as though woken by the bought of silence, Rey sloughs off her blankets. The musty air inside the AT-AT is nearly unbearable, and Ben is thankful when she slings open the blast doors, crawling out to assess the damages plastering the exterior of her home. He follows and she leads, emptying the water bladders attached to her speeder into the distillation apparatus and examining the extent of the damages before settling on the roof under the newly emptied skies.   
  
Ben joins her, staring up into the stars. The swirling galaxy overhead has always made him feel insignificant, empty. But here, on this planet, the vastness and desolation gives him that feeling instead and the starlight filtering down from the pinholes in the heavens are the only real light he can sense on this entire planet.   
  
“Which one do you call home?” Rey asks so quietly he almost misses it.   
  
He considers the question, more complicated than the girl probably even knows. Alderaan his mother always told him to answer. _We’re from the royal house of Alderaan, my little prince_ she’d say. He’d never seen the place with his own eyes. Naboo, then, and his grandmother’s house in the lay country. A woman his mother had never even met. The apartment on Coruscant, where his mother handled her diplomatic dealings when she assumed the title of General. He’d never felt quite at home in the bustling metropolis, not that he spent all that much time there in the end, what with the moving around to bunkers and bases all the time. Did he even have a home at all?

He searches his mind for answers and not a single one brings his father to mind. He supposes that hunk of shrapnel he calls a ship can’t exactly be pointed out in a sea of thousands of lights, light years away. Not that he would ever entertain the idea of the Falcon being home anyhow. The Jedi Temple with Uncle Luke has become the closest thing to home that Ben has ever known, a rock to cling to in the storm but he was still lost at sea.   
  
Ben leans over next to the girl so she can follow his finger to where he’s pointing.

“Not in the core of the disk here, but far away in this dim collection on the edges, in the western reaches. You probably can’t even see the star from this far away. It’s maybe 60,000 light years from this part of the outer rim. A small star system, not much trade traffic.” He doesn’t want to give too much away, he shouldn’t be telling her anything at all but a part of him, that little corner of his mind that his Uncle has cultivated within him to listen to the Force, is yearning to tell her more, to tell her everything.

“What’s it like?” Her curiosity is bubbling over now, and Ben isn’t exactly interested in telling this scavenging nobody any more on the needling topic of his origins.

“Quiet. Wet.” He stands up, signaling to her the conversation is over.

“How wet? Rain and seas?” 

“Enough water to drown the mon calamari, the desert is a nice change of pace really,” He spits out bitterly. The girl is becoming too curious. He hoped she’d take the hint that this wasn’t exactly a topic open for discussion but he shouldn’t have expected any less from a scavenger. He presses the switch by the blast doors and she perches her head over the edge of the robotic thigh, looking down at him.  
  
“I’ve always dreamed of seeing the ocean,” She sighs wistfully before hoping down.

“Well as much as I hate to disappoint you it’s not much different than what you’ve got here. Nothing to see for thousands of miles, lots of sand, blistering sun and a whole lot of water but not a drop to drink. Don’t even get me started on the salt and stickiness in the air. And if you’re lucky enough, a storm comes to drown you. Come to think of it, it’s probably worse than the desert you should stay here.”

“We should get some sleep, we still have a long ride ahead of us in the morning,” Rey looks a bit sour and dejected when she speaks, but curls back up in the same corner as before.

Ben leans against the curved metal wall of the hollowed out cockpit, jumping a bit when his skin meets the cold surface and tries to curl up into his robes. He had no idea how freezing the desert could get at night.

A few hours later, Ben wakes up to the sounds of Rey thumping around the tin can of a home, bent over at the waist to avoid knocking her head open on the slew of sharp steel corners. He feels the scratch of something against his face and realizes it’s a woolen blanket, complete with holes and some sorry patchwork. She must have given it to him when she saw him shivering. Not that he wanted the thing. It was itchy and smelled like oil and human funk. But when he feels the residual cool in the morning air he pulls it tight over his shoulders.   
  
It’s still dark outside and hunger claws at his stomach. Rey mixes the water and suddenly the moldy looking vitamin bread doesn’t seem nearly as unappetizing as it did last night. They scarf down their meal in silence and Ben watches as Rey uses a smidge of the water to melt some of the grime off her face and hair before tying the brown locks back into three neat buns. She looks at him.  
  
“You ready?”


	3. Cool for the Summer - Demi Lovato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cockiness is a genetically inheritable trait, right? My favorite part of Han and Leia's relationship was definitely the top shelf banter. With his father's sass and his grandfather's angst young Hanakin gets some real wingdingers to hurl at Rey in this one. Enjoy (;

Rey slows down the thundering pace when the twisted x-wing remains poking their heads out of the sands get more densely packed. It’s nearly noon and the full force of the Jakku sun is taking its toll on the duo. Despite the grumbling of the engines, Rey can hear Ben panting in her ear. She’ll have to get him out of the sun, and soon.

She carries the speeder over the crest of a few more dunes before settling in some dwindling shade by an old rebellion blockader. Not quite as big as the star destroyers, but still a monolith rising ominously out of its final resting place. Ben has his back pressed up against the metal exterior, warm to the touch even in the shade. He’s tearing violently at the straps on his robes, pulling off whatever pieces are willing to come off _right now_.  
  
“Cut it out, you can’t do that!” Rey snaps at him.  
  
“What’s the matter, sand rat, never seen a man with a body nicer than malnourished bones or rolls of cantina fat?”

“Personally, I don’t go looking at men’s bodies and I’m certainly not in the mood to be looking at yours!” Rey blushes despite herself and is fuming with anger, certain that if she had any water in her body to spare it would be steaming off of her head right now.

“I take it you’re partial to the female of the species then, my apologies. Didn’t mean to jump to conclusions. But I should warn you, I hear they’re far deadlier than the male,” Ben’s voice never seems to be free of salt when he speaks to her.  
  
His chest is barred to her now and she turns away to stop her eyes from wandering, just to spite him. She does catch the sight of a pink ridge scored into his rib cage, with smaller parallel twins on his corresponding shoulder before he leaves her visual field. She wonders what story could have left a mark like that. Scars always have stories.

“You hear they are? No experience then?” She can’t help but needle him another round.

“Care to enlighten me with your vast wealth of knowledge on the subject? No? Don’t color me surprised, that tin can you call a home doesn’t look like it’s seen another face since Jedi walked the earth.”

“Ever. Seen another face ever,” She corrects bitingly, very quickly starting to regret having taken him there in the first place. Damned sandstorms. “And for the record I do happen to like men, nice men. Just not scoundrels like you.”

“You wound me,” She’s not facing him but she can hear his eyes rolling in the intonation he spits it out with alone.

“I don’t know why I bother with you at all, but you’d better put some of those robes back on if you know what’s good for you. It slows the dehydration process and protects you from burns. You can get sun poisoning in a matter of hours out here,” Rey walks over to the netting of her speeder, pulling out a water bladder and a jar of oily black tar while Ben heeds her advice and begrudgingly re-robes himself. “The burns are already starting on your face, they’re nearly purple.”

She takes a swig from the bladder giving him a drink. When he’s finished, she moves to examine the burns. Ben winces when her calloused fingers graze the tender flesh of his cheekbones.

“Oh shut up, anyone with scars like that all over him has no right to groan at a little sunburn.”

“So you admit it then, you _were_ looking?”

“I really ought to leave you out here to fry. Or better yet, sell you to the slavers. A guy like you would fetch at least 60 portions, easy,” She says this, but works in the oily black salve beneath his eyes and on top his cheekbones and nose, where the worst of the burning has amassed.

“Don’t get so excited,” He quips. “You don’t exactly look the type to be into the whole bondage thing.”

“Well you don’t _look_ ignorant, so I guess you can’t judge a book,” She screws the cap back on the salve, tucking it away in her satchel. “That should keep the worst of the burns at bay, but try to remember not to rub your eyes.”

“It smells like petrol liquor.”

“Better than wandering the planet delirious with heat stroke. Besides, it’s a pleasant change from your usual musk,” Despite herself, Rey’s mouth curls up at the edges. Frustrating he may be but he’s certainly a riot to get a rise out of. Not that she’d let him know that. She’s glad he’s facing the other way, huffing and running his hands through his now-greasy hair and doesn’t catch her slight smile. 

They trudge up the dunes to a hole scored into the side of the blockader’s hull, staring down into the upturned ship. The inside is dark, but not completely so and the air coming out is several degrees cooler than the outside, the temperature stabilization a byproduct of being buried in the earth for so long. Rey flicks on the light attached to her mask.

“Stay close. Try not to inhale the dust,” Rey instructs and Ben scoffs, but follows her lead anyway. She’s been right so far.

Rey has an uncanny knack for knowing where to step inside these clunky old booby traps. It’s as though she can feel the ground creaking beneath her before she even steps, predict how the interior will shift to reconcile her weight. Her steps are deathly silent, and Ben’s never fail to keep time. The deeper they go into the ship, the more difficult it becomes to see. The inside winds like a maze and Rey trusts her instincts to keep her from getting lost.

They reach an old control bridge, and broken glass snaps underfoot as they walk into the room, disturbed dust swirling around in the beam from Rey’s simple headlamp. The stench of death fills the air and Ben gasps, pulling his robes over his mouth and nose to try to stave off the gag building in his throat.

_Don’t inhale the dust._

Rey doesn’t seem to be phased by the littering of bones and clothes trampled underfoot. By the looks of it, they don’t appear to be the first ones to have come through here. None of the dozens of bony hands are wearing rings. Ben swallows at the brutality of it all.

Suddenly, the silence between them becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

“How old were you?” He asks her. Rey doesn’t pick up on any bitterness in his voice this time. “How old were you when you became a scavenger?”

“Seven,” She deadpans. “I was nine when that good for nothing Plutt you met in the junk yard tried to sell me to slavers. I’ve been on my own ever since.”

Ben gets the impression that this topic selection was about as welcome as her questions about his home world, and as he has a bit more tact than she does he decides to let the topic drop. Silence nests between them again and the air becomes perceptively heavy.

The world is bathed in an eerie ambient blue, frozen forever in the moment of terror the crew experienced as the ship plummeted from it’s orbit, burning up in the atmosphere and baking the inhabitants trapped within alive. Rey feels Ben coming up behind her before he speaks. She’s prying off a panel to access the wiring beneath an altitude control board.

“Can I help?” He speaks softly, as if the ghosts aboard the ship could some how wake from their slumber at the disturbance. She almost teases him for it, but bites the inside of her cheek instead. Somehow, the gesture seems uncouth.

“Yeah,” She replies instead. “Find me something I can use as a fulcrum so I can use this pry bar to lift these switch boards. The circuits underneath are what we need.” _  
_

Ben crouches down, stomach on the floor so he can bury his arms in the compartment, grabbing the edges of the durasteel panel. With some grunting and heaving and Rey’s work fiddling with her staff, they manage to dislodge the twisted shrapnel.  
  
Rey slips on a pair of leather gloves and discharges herself on the floor to avoid ruining the fragile electronic components with static shocks. She worries the wires holding the microchip board in place free and carefully brushes the dust and sand free of the crevasses with her tiny, handmade jackrab fur brush. She licks the leads as she always does, looking for a trickle discharge from the quantum capacitors to ensure the wiring is intact.  
  
“Stop that,” Ben grabs her wrist, pulling the glove off one of her hands, running his thumb over the palm and squinting in the darkness.

“What are you doing?” Rey tries to pull her hand away but he holds it tighter, the best she can figure still searching for some foreign divination in the lines of her hands.

“Looking for metal poisoning. The elements they use to make the durable superconductors are fully oxidized and toxic to almost all biological systems. It leaves black and pink marks on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet when it gets bad.”

“Well I’m not dead yet,” Rey sharply pulls her hand out of his, but she runs her fingers over the flesh herself, looking for marks. She feels relief when she sees nothing there.

“It’s the sort of thing that takes time, like the radiation sickness the inner core pilots get sometimes. You’ll have to go on chelation therapy.” Rey thinks she sees something like compassion cross his face, but it’s gone in an instant as though it were a trick of the light.

“What makes you such an expert anyway?” Therapy. How ignorant. She doesn’t have money for medicine.

“My father once—never mind it’s not important.” Ben stands up and rolls his shoulders back and she can hear his joints cracking as he does. “Do we have everything we need?”

Rey bundles up the electrical components in a collection of old oil rags and slips them into her satchel, fastening the opening shut with the nuts and bolts she’s turned into makeshift buttons.

“Yeah, lets get out of here,” She leaves the musty room behind and he follows. They weave through the labyrinth of corridors in an easy silence, the somber atmosphere calling at least a temporary truce on their bickering.

The halls seem endless, every twist and turn looking identical to the one before it. Suddenly Rey freezesand pulls them both against the wall. On their left is a deep chasm with no perceivable bottom, and the path they’re following is only wide enough for one body to pass at a time.

“Did you hear that?” Her voice is so flighty and silent it would have been lost to the air if it hadn’t been right at his ear. She’s statuesque in her stillness, muscles wound taught and ready to run. Ben takes the hint and reflexively his hand drops to his weapon, hidden under his robes before he remembers that regardless what undead are lurking in this metallic graveyard he won’t be able to use it.  
  
“Yeah,” He whispers back. In truth, he hadn’t heard a sound, but he could sense the presence of something restless beneath them in the darkness. The question was, how did the girl know?  
  
“Damn it. Anoobas. I should have know they’d be here I’m so stupid. They’re attracted to the old power supplies; they like to gnaw on the wires. Don’t make any sudden movements and be as silent as you can,” Rey clings to the wall, edging along so gingerly the only sound is her light, intermittent breathing.  
  
Ben inches along beside her, the end of the ledge seeming impossibly far in the darkness. He tries to focus on his movements, his breathing, when his foot catches the edge of an old fuel canister, launching it boisterously down into the abyss. He winces, and before he has the chance to react further he feels Rey’s fingers snake around his wrist.

“RUN!” She screams, silence no longer a concern at all. She lets go of him, barreling down on the darkness at dizzying speeds. Ben’s hot on her heels but so are the ambiguous creatures screeching out of the chasm. He can hear their claws raking against the metal, making an ear splitting racket rivaled only by the hideous wailing that escapes their throats. He has no particular interest in looking back to see their faces.

Turn left. Right. Left. Left. Right again. Ben can feel his chest tightening with the exertion. Despite his training he’s not used to the low-oxygen atmosphere and blistering temperatures on Jakku. The creatures are gaining ground.

“How do you know this is the way out?” He calls after her breathlessly.

“I don’t!”

Comforting.

They whip around another corner and the world lights up with the white glow of the desert sun, filtering down from the cracks in the hull stories above them. Never in his life did he imagine he’d be thankful to return to the blistering desert sun.  
  
Rey scrambles up a wall, nimbly swinging her feet in and out of footholds, but he’s faster and he passes her on the way up. It’s not enough. The anoobas have almost closed the distance between them. The ceiling seems insurmountably high and in this moment, staring up into the light, he’s reminded of the day his mother tried to teach him to swim on his first trip to Naboo. Drowning. It feels like he’s drowning, and in a desert no less.  
  
His reverie is broken by a piercing wail of anguish and he looks down to see a claw hacking a chunk of flesh out of Rey’s calf. She drops the satchel. Ben watches a small infinity of emotions cross her face in a single instant.

Paroxysms of terror, pain, rage, and guilt. She lets go of the wall, grabbing the bag on her way down into the void below.

And in a moment of revelation, the pieces acquiesce into a portrait in Ben’s mind. Rey piloting the speeder. The draw to tell the girl about the temple. The surety of her steps on the rusted floor. Sensing the anoobas. Finding the path to the light in the darkness.

All the ship parts in the galaxy, the First Order tracking their movements, Master Luke’s search for Jedi sympathizers in the outer reaches, it was all a ruse. None of it matters.  
  
She’s the one. She’s the one Master Luke dragged him out to the backwater reaches at the edge of civilization against all perceivable sensibilities to find.

“It’s you.”  
  
Ben launches himself off the wall with an exhilarating shove of the force, diving head first after her. They’re plummeting, stories of space racing past their figures as they race dangerously closer to the bottom. He wraps one arm around her waist and the other desperately around a line of thick steel cabling hanging from the ceiling.

He cries out, Rey’s weight almost wrenching his one shoulder from its socket, his other arm shredded bloody by the friction of the cable. They’ve stopped falling, and Rey clings desperately to the front of his robes, the two of them panting. He looks down to see if she’s hurt.

“Sand rats don’t have nine lives.”

Rey is still too stunned to quip back, but she dislodges herself from his arms and moves her weight to the rope, clinging for dear life below Ben. They start to scramble upwards.

As if pulling one’s own body weight several stories up a steel cable wasn’t daunting enough, the fact that Ben is bleeding out all over the rope and making it slippery coupled with Rey’s virtually unusable crippled leg aren’t helping the situation in the slightest. The anoobas are clinging to the ceiling, and now two of them are clawing their way down the cable.

“Force and fates, this is not how I plan to light out,” Ben shifts all his weight to one arm, reaching his bloodied hand into his robes, pulling out some sort of metal tube in his fist.  
  
Rey hears the ardent sound of igniting fire and the whole surroundings become bathed in the soft green glow emanating off the unmistakable kyber-plasma blade. A lightsaber. 

The hum of the beam fluctuates with each swing and Rey stares captivated as Ben whirls the thing, severing the heads of their pursuers with two clean, decisive strikes. She watches mesmerized as the cauterized carcasses tumble to their resting place below. The remainder of the pack has the presence of mind to flee and Ben sheaths his weapon and they finish their scramble to the surface.

They fall out onto the sands, exasperated. 

“You… You’re a Jedi,” Rey rolls over, searching Ben for some kind of confirmation, her green eyes the size of saucers. She speaks with a tone of hushed reverence. “Then the myths are true. The Force. The Light and the Dark. Luke Skywalker. All of it’s true.”

“Every word,” Ben sits up first to his knees, then drags himself on his feet. Rey thinks she catches him say something to the effect of _not that I need any more reminders of the glory days_ under his breath. Her awestruck expression shifts to blind fury in a matter of moments and she springs to her feet, following him back to the speeder.

“Well Force alive, couldn’t you have pulled that one out of your ass a bit sooner? Or maybe you just like to be the hero?” She spits.

“Maybe you just like to be the damsel.”

“I can take care of myself, no one asked you to come jumping after me! I am no damsel and the only distress here is the duress you’re going to be under if you don’t start talking this instant!” Rey’s feet are slipping out from underneath her angry trudging steps, making it hard to take her seriously.

“It’s against the rules for members of the order to reveal themselves.”

“Rules? You’re going to hound on the rules at a time like this? We could have been killed!”

“I believe _could_ is the operative word in that sentence.” Ben pauses to turn and look at her, but she keeps her eyes fixed straight ahead and marches past him, limping slightly. He can nearly see the haze of white-hot fury emanating from her form. She reminds him of his mother, lamenting late at night in the galley when his father got caught smuggling after he’d promised her over and over he’d left the “trade.” He swallows the memory.

“Forget the First Order, you’re our biggest trouble out here. If you hadn’t kicked that fuel canister we wouldn’t have been in this mess to begin with, I had everything under control.” Rey tosses the satchel into the netting of her speeder.

“How about a thank you, huh? ‘Thanks, Ben, for not letting my scavenger yokes splatter into oblivion at the bottom of a rotting star destroyer, due in no small part to my own blithering stupidity.’ ”  
  
“It’s a Corellian resistance blockader.”

“Shut up.”

 

* * *

 

Rey and Ben return to the scrap yard miserably late, and she tries to ignore the crawling shivers in her skin from the cold night air, the hunger moaning in her gut, and the piercing pain in her leg. She hauls the parts bag off the speeder and over to the ship where the Master is already waiting for them on the bridge.

“Did you find what you needed?” He asks, his beige cloak pulled up over his head, obscuring a large part of his face, but Rey can still see that he’s smiling. She wonders how two such polar opposite men could possibly end up wandering the galaxy in each other’s company.

“Yes, luckily programming electronics are relatively plentiful on the older ships, the parts that get picked clean are typically the high dollar mechanical elements.” Rey makes her way over to the gaping hole in the wall she’d left a day ago, refreshing her mind as to the situation at hand. She chews her lip and slips on her leather work gloves again.

She’s exhausted, but time passes quickly when she’s absorbed in her work. She wipes her face, streaking black oil marks across her brow. Her legs are folded up underneath her body and she leans into the wall, tightening the last nuts and bolts to bind together the stopgap repair work. She moves to the exterior of the ship so she can solder some sheet metal plating over the hole in the exterior hull. The torch flames lick all about and the air reeks of butane combustion and Rey should probably be wearing a mask right now but that’s the least of her life’s dangers. She’s so engrossed in her work she doesn’t hear Ben come up behind her.

“You’re bleeding.” He’s looking at her leg. She’d yet to properly attend to it, just given it some water and one of the bandages from around her arm but she couldn’t deny the pain was pulsing up into her spine, refusing to abate.

“You’re not wrong,” She deadpans back, not taking her eyes away from the soldering work as though it were the most fascinating thing in the galaxy.

“Let me fix it, I have some bacta and clean bandages on board the ship, if you’d just—“

Rey drops her tools into the sand and brushes past him and the Master, who’d come out as well to admire her newly completed handiwork. She storms up the bridge of the ship.

“I can take care of my self please and thank you very much, _hero_.”

“Fine! I hope you get gangrene and have to saw the damn thing off, _sand rat_ ,” Ben’s expression is embarrassed and furious. He huffs and drags his fingers through his hair, cursing under his breathe.

“I stand corrected, Ben, you did inherit something from your father,” the Master says to him. “His way with women.”

“Shut up.”

The Master walks away to join Rey on the ship. Ben opts to boil outside, plopping dejectedly on the ship’s wing.

“Rey your work is the finest I’ve seen in these parts of the galaxy, thank you for your generosity. We are truly in your debt,” The Master walks over to the haphazardly organized cabinet just inside the ‘fresher, pulling out some bacta and clean bandages before handing them to Rey. She accepts the offer with a small nod.  
  
“I’d like to discuss your payment,” He starts.

“Most dealings here on Jakku are generally compensated with food,” Rey hisses when the bacta meets her swollen flesh.

“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” When he says this, Rey looks up from licking her wounds. He pauses for a moment before continuing. “Come with us.”

Her eyes go wide and her mouth parts open, at a loss for what to say. She’s only met these people a day ago, and one of them is far from the company she sees herself warming up to while weaving through hyperspace in a cramped ship for days on end. Besides, she’s never even been off-world. She can’t go off-world. She has to stay here, on Jakku, and wait for her family. And oh, does she know about waiting.  
  
But something about the man draws her in, from some profound and all encompassing aspect of her instinct she doesn’t have a word for, the voice within her that pines for the stars at night. It tells her to trust him.

“I’m flattered by the offer, really I am, but I can’t accept. I have to stay here on Jakku.” Her eyes are sad when she speaks, even if the rest of her face doesn’t betray her.

“Whomever you’re waiting for in this place…” He reaches out with his one leathered old hand to take her own, blue eyes searching her face for her real feelings on the matter. “They are never going to return. But I think you already knew that.”

Tears well up in Rey’s eyes as he speaks but she can’t bring herself to pull away, to argue. She knows he’s right. It still hurts to hear someone say it aloud; somehow it has more physicality and permanence this way.

“Rey… The Force, it’s calling to you. Let it in.”

She shuts her eyes, letting the memory of Ben and the lightsaber flood her psyche, juxtaposed piercingly with the restless and lonely nights here on Jakku.

“I’ll pack my things.”

Ben and the Master watch as she climbs up onto the clunky old speeder, bolting off into the desert night.

“The girl…” Ben’s eyes hunt her silhouette until it becomes a black dot on the horizon and finally winks out of sight. “She’s force-sensitive.”

“I know.”

“She’s coming back?”

“Yes. And when she does, you’ll have her starting meditations.”


	4. Domestic Pressures - Johann Johannsson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our darling Rey of sunshine isn't in this chapter, tear drops on my guitar. She'll be back next chapter. I'm sorry but baby Ben was dying to be written! Doesn't mean this chapter doesn't have romance, though. A flash back to his youth, part one. Part two comes later. 
> 
> I 10/10 recommend actually listening to the song as background to this one. 
> 
> I'm also sick as a dog right now, any love you leave for me will go towards healing my broken and ill physical state please and carrots. Love y'all for stickin around.

Ben’s earliest memory is of his mother, Leia. It is a simple, sensory recollection. One just like thousands of others he keeps locked away inside him. He can feel the warmth of her leg beneath the silky fabric of her loose fitting clothes.  
  
It’s cold and the memory has an air of bitter-sweetness laced around the edges, or maybe that’s a more advanced emotion that his mind attached to this moment in post-production.  
  
There’s a howling sound behind him, crescendoing in pitch and his eyes sting with tears. When he opens them, his visual field is flooded with a sea of rippling white fabric, clasped desperately in his tiny hands. Some corner of his instinct that’s better at placing things than his conscious mind recognizes the wailing engines belong to the Falcon.  
  
He feels his mother’s fingers nest themselves in his knotted black locks and pull his head against her thigh. She smells dry, with aged floral undertones, a scent like potpourri that coats the palette. This is how she always smelled.  
  
It’s too loud to hear anything but that single sound, but in his adult mind he imagines her sighing, or sometimes maybe crying, with him.

* * *

It comes as no surprise that all his earliest memories share his mother’s face. His father was rarely ever home, opting instead to go fishing out trouble throughout the Galaxy with Uncle Chewie, chasing the glory days of the rebellion the way a fool would hunt the impossibility of holding starlight in his hands.

To Ben, his father was impossibly heroic, and everything his mother promised him he would live up to. It was written in his destiny. Even then, Han was more of a myth to his own son than a man.

Ben’s first memory of his father, he thinks, is when he is five years old. For the time being, his mother is stationed at the rebellion base on Yavin IV. The politicking around on Coruscant over the foundation of the New Galactic Senate rages on and with no planet to call her own, she buries her sorrows by chasing her grand visions of a united, peaceful Galaxy.  
  
Now that he’s older, Ben realizes his mother and father were never so different after all. Perhaps that’s why they fought so much.  
  
His father happens to be only a few parsecs away from the sector, likely smuggling “live cargo” out of the reaches dominated by the expanding territories of the First Order. Not that Ben understands any of this. All he understands is the surge of unbridled joy in his chest when he spots his father on the landing decks to surprise him for his Name Day.

He worms free of his mother’s embrace, feet pounding on the tarmac, with eyes only on one thing as he shoves past the astromech droids and orange and white rebel pilots. There’s only one pilot he’s interested in seeing.  

He buries his face in his father’s shoulder, smelling the oil and grime he’s come to associate as the smell of adventure and feels himself spun around in circles as his father barrels out laughter. Uncle Chewie’s howl echoes thunderously throughout the hangar and Ben feels nearly suffocated when he’s buried under all the fur from the conjoined embrace. He’s never felt so unconditionally happy in his life.

That night, his father gives him a haphazardly wrapped gift and his mother rolls her eyes at his sorry handiwork. Ben rips at the paper ferociously, revealing the white gleam of his very own rebel pilot’s helmet. He runs his fingers reverently over the red and blue decals, fingers fumbling with the antenna and yellow visor so he can slip the too-large covering over his head. He looks up to where his father is sitting, beaming.

Ben decides he is going to be a pilot, brave and fearless, just like his father. He has never wanted anything more in his life.

* * *

The next year, his parents seem to be having one of their few stints where they can bare to be in the other’s presence, and his mother suggests they take a vacation to Naboo. After the Galactic Civil War had ended and his mother was declared a homeless hero, she had inherited a palace in the lay country. A gift of reconciliation in memory of their beloved Queen, the late Amidala, his grandmother. His mother told him she was gentle and beautiful, but sad. She had died when she was little girl.

Ben knows now that this was never the case at all. His mother had never known the face of his grandmother. She was killed by his grandfather. Darth Vader.

The evening sunlight dances orange and yellow over the water, fashioning the fluid surface into a sight like blown glass as far as the eye can see. Back then, Ben was too young to be so impressed by the beauty. He’s merely captivated by his father’s presence, watching him from the shoreline.

The fresh, warm breeze carries off the water as the tides pull out, waves kissing the sands with a ceaseless and relaxing drone. His hair is swept up by the air and sticks to his face, leaving black streaks in his memory of his mother walking out to put her feet in the water with him.

She leads him out into the beckoning of the lapping currents, him sitting on her hip with the help of the buoyancy of the salty inland sea. They laugh and bounce over the waves, and he begs her to let him go. She shows him how to move his arms to tread the water, keeping his tiny head bobbing above the surface. He worms out of her hands, swimming away laughing even though she calls out to him to come back to her.

Ben’s too busy looking to see if his father is watching him to notice the wave that sends him tumbling under the current. His body spins and he is unsure which way is up and his hands dig into the sand, the wrong direction. He opens his eyes and sees the light filtering down into the water. Where it had looked so warm and welcoming before, the sea is dark and unforgiving beneath the surface. The rays of the sun drift down like hands reaching out hopelessly to his own as he claws out for their intangible purchase.

His lungs like torches blaze in his chest and he shuts his eyes tight. He feels something snake into his lengthened locks and drag him to the surface and out onto the sand, heaving swallowed salt water from his gut. It’s his father.

His mother rushes to his side, crying and brushing the hair out of his face with her gentle fingers as she pats his back to help him cough up the remnants of the flood inside him. His father isn’t looking at him.

“You should listen when your mother tells you to do something,” His father’s voice carries virtually no inflection.

“It isn’t his fault…” His mother whispers delicately.

“No, Leia it is! You can’t treat him like he’s made of glass! You can’t treat him like this forever!”

“Han, please! He’s just a boy!”

“Falling in the water isn’t what drowns you, Leia. Staying there is.”

* * *

Ben is eight years old when his Uncle Luke, the Jedi Knight comes to visit them. His eyes are the size of satellite dishes when he watches him ignite the green saber and lets him hold it in his hand. He feels the surge of something compelling wire through his veins, mesmerized by the elegant hum of the blade.  
  
For the first time, Ben dreams of being something other than a pilot.

“That’s enough of that,” His mother says nervously, reaching over to grasp the hilt, killing the plasma stream.  
  
“Ben, it’s time for you to go to bed.” She drags him up stairs, and he pouts. He always misses out on all the fun.  
  
He fakes sleep for a few moments in the darkness, until he hears her reach the galley and settle back into the conversation. He slips on his socks and out his bedroom door, hiding in the shadows of the hallway where he can eavesdrop without being seen.  
  
“The Force, it flows within him, Han… He needs a teacher,” Uncle Luke is pleading with his parents at the table. “He is powerful, destined to be great, like his grandfather before him. It’s written in his blood.”

“Our father was a murder Luke!” He can’t see his mother’s face, but he’s familiar with her tone when she is on the brink of tears.  
  
“Yes… But he was confused. There was still light in him, Leia. And that light lives within your son, too. Let me guide him.”

“Luke… He’s all I have… I can’t bare to watch him go…” She whispers.  
  
“He’s my son, Luke,” It’s his father’s turn to argue. “He’s going to be a pilot like his father. A great leader in the Resistance. Our family doesn’t need to die for some hokey religion again.” Ben can tell that he’s yielding because his mother wants him to. His father has no dreams of him carrying on his legacy, or at least he’s never voiced them.  
  
“Very well then,” Ben hears Uncle Luke push himself back from the table, standing up to go. His mother is crying now, as she wishes her brother goodbye.  
  
Ben’s eyes prick with tears of his own, boiling over with rage and disappointment with his father. He is almost caught when a hiccup of a sob escapes his throat.

* * *

From that day on, Ben becomes consumed with doing everything he can to live up to his new destiny as a Jedi Knight, regardless of what his father says. He’s never home to argue anyways. 

When his mother tells him that his grandfather built Threepio when he was still Ben’s age, his eyes light up with the idea of creating a droid of his own. He collects old scrap parts around the repair hangars on the rebel base, a small collection of gadgets and gizmos amassing themselves in his room. He has no idea what function any of them serve.  
  
Ben remembers locking himself away in his room, quietly fiddling with the wires and switchboards long into the night and most of the day. His mother pries at him to get him to come out and play with the other boys, the sons of rebel pilots stationed on the base, but Ben has no interest in being teased over how bad he is at holoball. Or stunstick. Or his poor scores in his classes.  
  
He’s never been good at anything he tries, but oh Force does he want to be, to see his father’s face beam with pride again like the day he put on that rebel alliance helmet.  
  
Nothing he ever builds works.

* * *

When his mother tells him about her plans to move to Coruscant to handle the disintegrating relations among a plethora of member star systems in the fledging Republic, Ben is absolutely furious with her. Moving around from one hokey rebel military base to another was frustrating enough, but the city was grimy and filled with people, a place where it was truly impossible to find quiet and solitude.  
  
For weeks they sling insults at each other, some backhanded or passive, others escalating to full-blown screaming matches. By the time his father comes home, he and his mother haven’t said a word to each other in three days. Ben broods in his room, temper boiling beneath the surface. A litany of crushed starship parts he’d long abandoned understanding litter the floor, mangled from their hapless luck of being close to him in his fury.  
  
He can feel the force bleeding out from within, undeniably, uncontrollably now where it was only a whisper in the past. It proves most troublesome when his fuse ignites, which is often. More often now that he feels the itching burn it leaves beneath his skin like a feedback loop spiraling out of control.  
  
At night he’s plagued ceaselessly by hallucinogenic nightmares, circling him inside his skull, waiting to pounce in his moments of weakness. A blistering desert graveyard of warships. A dark forest, blinding with snow and an all-encompassing pain. Durasteel corridors and marred by harsh artificial lights. A forest, muggy and indiscernible. The insides of the Falcon. A woman, dirty and wiry and hopelessly beautiful. And rain. Endlessly, it seems, rain everywhere.  
  
He wakes up in cold sweats every morning, and at night he tosses and turns in his exhaustion, his body begging for sleep to come to him in the darkness and his mind fighting the inevitability of another night in hell.

When his father suggests that maybe it’s time for Ben to go into the family business, Ben thinks he’s finally found a path out of this suffering and instead chasing his dreams of adventure that have been plotting behind his eyes since the moment he came forth from the wound.  
  
His father says it’s because he got his genes. Ben prefers to think it’s the Skywalker inside him.  
  
His mother huffs and puffs about smuggling and danger and for-the-last-time-can-we-not-mention-the-death-star-okay-Han and his father finally calms her down with his typical scoundrel charms. And just like that the gravity of the situation comes down on him like a ton of bricks. This is it. He’s going to learn to fly.  
  
He climbs into the Falcon’s co-pilot’s chair, humongous as it envelops his tiny frame. He remembers that it belongs the Uncle Chewie, after all. His hands drift over the array of switchboards and control lights littering the dash and the ceiling, until his father bats his and away.  
  
“Watch it, starbuck, this girl’s been with me longer than your mother,” His father quips and Ben’s usually not much for his sense of humor but he laughs. “First thing you have to do is prime the fuel cells, if those babies don’t heat up to a combustible temperature before you light the propulsion ignition or you’ll flood the engines and you won’t be going anywhere.”

His father’s hands flurry around the dash, pushing buttons and tripping switches while alarms and his voice whirl throughout the cabin. He nods in affirmation when his father manages a glance in his direction, beaming and listing off a plethora of irrelevant information mixed with tales of grandeur. To Ben’s ears, he might as well have been speaking Ithorese.  
  
“And it’s that simple, kid, you think you got it?” His father smiles broad and expectant.

“Yeah, you really explained it well, yeah I—I think I can do it, yeah.”  
  
He’s doomed.

“Alright you give it a whirl then, go on.”  
  
“Uh…” Ben stares at the buttons, considering the infinities of possible combinations that could light this beast to fly or on fire. He plays it safe. “You know, this stuff’s kinda boring, how about we get to the flying part instead?”  
  
“I knew you were my son, kid,” He pats his back and howls with laughter, pulling the Falcon up off the ground with dizzying speeds. Ben digs his hands into the armrests and squeezes his eyes shut, feeling his stomach lurch at the g’s they’re undoubtedly pulling. Doomed. Yes, most definitely doomed.

Things only go from bad to worse when they break critical velocity and his father turns the controls over to him. He sees the light of his short youth flash before his eyes as he pulls at the reigns and the whole contraption groans and lurches under his efforts. Accelerating with the help of the planet’s gravitational field, they’re plummeting down back into the atmosphere with a speed enough to heat the exterior hulls dangerously hot. Their entry angle isn’t helping either. Alarms wail in the Falcon cockpit.

“The controls are inverted, Ben!” His father grabs his arm, banking them upward with a 360-degree barrel roll. He’s surprised aerospace command hasn’t locked in on their comm systems for PUI tagging after that stunning maneuver.

“What?” He can’t process everything that’s going on in the ship at once or his mind feels like it’s going to implode. How does his father do it?

“Just like on every other ship in the Galaxy! What, were you born in a Sarlaac pit you little rancor?”  
  
“You’d have known if you’d have been there.”

“Why you little—Force alive, Ben I just had that dish replaced!”

“It had shitty reception anyway.”  
  
“Bank left, you need to compensate for the irregular gravitational pull or you’re gonna blow the motivator!”  
  
“What?”

“No your other left, Ben, are you stupid or something? What’s your mother feeding you on Yavin! Cut the fluid oscillating stabilizers in the back quadrant or we’re gonna tailspin right back to that tarmac.”

“What?”

“Say what again! Go ahead, I dare you!”  
  
Eventually, his father takes over the controls again and they light back in the hangar where his mother is waiting for them. Ben flies out of the ship at the speed of light, chucking the contents of his guts all over the solid ground beneath his feet and hands again. The ground. Ground is nice.  
  
“Flying is for droids…” He moans, rolling on his back.  
  
Dejectedly, his father shakes his head and walks inside.

* * *

When Ben is thirteen years old, his mother forces him to join the legislative youth program after their move to Coruscant, despite his pleas and tears to do _anything_ else in the Galaxy. What she might have called a “fit,” Ben likes to remember in his own mind as a reasonable, if perhaps emotional, argument against something that would turn out to be an utter waste of his time. 

His hair is down to his shoulders now; smooth black locks that frame his face that the boys back on Yavin likened to that of “a filthy rancor”. His mother calls it sharply featured and uniquely alluring, that he’ll understand what she means when he’s older. When he looks in the mirror, all he sees is a mutilated facsimile of his father’s handsomeness. Not that he wants to look like that absent nerf herder, anyway. At the very least, his hair is a different color.  
  
“Jedi keep their hair long,” He refuses to recall his tone of voice as pouty—brooding is a far superior term.  
  
“Well generals and senators don’t,” His mother replies exasperatedly, tiring of their seemingly endless rounds of argument. The Twi’lek barber raises the sheers to his head and Ben locks eyes with himself in the mirror as twists of black light like feathers to the floor.  
  
The morning of his first day, his mother dresses him up in these terribly stifling robes. He’s got on this suffocating grey woolen turtleneck with pleats that stick out beyond the arms of his muted violet robe. His hair is slicked back into place, nothing to hide his face behind. He’s never felt more hideous.  
  
“Why do I have to wear this shit…” He growls out, arms folded across his chest, putting a distance between him and his mother. He doesn’t look her in the eye.

“Where did you learn to talk like that? Nevermind, I’m sure five minutes on that damn ship of Han’s will do it,” She sighs tiredly and her eyes look painfully distant when she speaks next. “This is traditional formal wear for the royal court of Alderaan. You are her prince, you must dress accordingly.”

He roles his eyes but doesn’t open his mouth to argue. There are battles to be picked with his mother but he had learned long ago Alderaan’s traditions were not one of them.  
  
Most of his memories of his time at the academy are a jumbled blur of boredom and boiling frustration. His bouts of broken fury indicate he’s certainly not cut out for the diplomatic arts the way his mother is, and it isn’t long before he finds himself with the same number of friends he had back on Yavin—none. He’s shoved all the pictures of this time of his life into a singular montage of resentment.  
  
All except for one.  
  
Ben meets her on his first day at the academy. Well, he doesn’t _meet_ her then if he’s being honest with himself. He spies her from across the room at the opening ceremonies, with a group of handmaidens giggling in a circle around her. She’s a few classes older than him, and he has to weave through crowds in the auditorium to reach her section, hunting for just another glimpse of her.  
  
Her hair is the color of warm starlight, bound in golden tourniquets as it cascades down her back. Her black dress hugs her frame, silken trappings and lace billowing about the floor, trailing her as she glides so delicately around the room. Her face is painted a gentle pale, with little red dots blushing her cheeks. Her eyes are so indescribably blue and he wants to stare at them forever as though he were a desert traveler and she was his oasis. Her soft features are framed by golden chains and ruby beading dangling off her towering headpiece. He didn’t think such beautiful creatures could exist in the entire galaxy.  
  
She catches his gaze, and his face flushes a bright red before he ducks to the floor behind one of the marbled pillars, hands clawing at some sickening feeling inside his chest.  
  
Her name is Kædé, he learns, and the pleasant nausea that rises in his stomach each time he lays eyes on her only grows more painful each time they meet. He makes it his mission to learn everything about her.  
  
She’s a princess of the monarchy elect on Naboo, and he dreams of the two of them together on the balcony at his grandmother’s palace in the lay country, staring out over the crystalline sea. He imagines the wind running itself through her wild blonde locks, then he imagines it’s his own fingers.  
  
Ben has only managed the courage to speak to her three times in passing over the course of the of the few months he has known her, but the feelings her gaze bring out of him tear him apart at the seams. He resolves to tell her how he feels.  
  
He knows that he’ll be far too flustered to tell her to her face—a coward, his adult mind admits to himself in the gaps—besides she’s constantly surrounded by her little band of handmaidens and he can’t imagine the embarrassment of spilling out his deepest feelings in front of them as well. He resolves to write her a letter.  
  
Ben refuses to recall the details of the prose to his mind as he remembers writing it out, over and over again. He’d even done it on a real sheet of paper. How sickeningly romantic, he thinks to himself now.  
  
He watches her open it from the mezzanine above the main floor courtyard, where she and her handmaidens eat their midday lunch. He’d left it on the bench by the fountain with her name on it, hoping dearly that she would find it. Now that she had, the throbbing of his heart in his throat makes him wish to Force and Fates she hadn’t.  
  
“Well, who is it from, Kædé?” Her handmaidens buzz excitedly around her.  
  
“Ben Solo…” She says quietly, and he can’t discern her reaction from the tone she says it.

Her handmaidens break out into a babbling gossip array around her once again.

“Him?!” “Isn’t he the prince of that exploded planet?” “Shut up, Cordé, you can’t just ask if someone’s planet exploded!” “He’s _Han Solo’s_ son!” “The war hero?” “No, the smuggler.” “Isn’t he the one who threatened to throw that Kuati boy into a sarlacc pit during the mock senate debate?” “I heard he got thrown out of Mar Anatak’s class because he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.” “Not surprising, he’s so brooding and angry all the time it’s a misery to talk to him.” “Hah! I bet he thinks he’s real dark and mysterious.” “I heard that sometimes he gets so upset during the mock debates he cries!” “Really?” “What a loser!” “So what are you gonna do, Kædé?” “Yeah, Kædé, what are you going to do?”  
  
Her bubbling circle of yes women quiets down to a hush around her, waiting expectantly for her response. Ben holds his breath, too.  
  
Kædé barrels over with laughter and his heart feels like its been ground into irreparable oblivion inside his chest.  
  
“Of course I’m going to say no, I’ve barely said two words to him! Besides, read this. ‘I hate the ocean. It’s cold, rough, irritating and utterly untamable. Not like you.’”  
  
Ben wishes desperately that the floor would swallow him whole, that he might be swallowed by the depths of hell where he could burn for an eternity because that certainly would be better than standing here right now. To his horror, she continues.  
  
“’Ever since I met you, I’ve been in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you, I can’t breathe.’ I mean, who would think this is even remotely romantic? Honestly, the whole thing is a bit creepy, really.”  
  
Ben can’t stand to listen to another word of it or he knows his bones will collapse in on themselves under the weight of his humiliation and despair. He doesn’t care if they notice him leaving, he runs away.  
  
That night, in his bed, he wails into his pillows with all the lights off and the windows closed. His sobs choke through his body until he’s hiccupping, hyperventilated and his cheeks are salty and soaked and his nose is snotted and runny. When he’s out of tears to spill, he curls up around the pillow, tracing absent patterns in the sheets while he tries to regain his composure.  
  
He pretends not to hear when his mother slides the door open, padding wordlessly over to his defeated shape huddled over in the darkness. She places her hand on his back rubbing softly up and down.  
  
“I hate myself,” he admits, more for his own benefit than her own.  
  
“Please don’t say that, you know that I love you more than anything in this whole Galaxy,” she replies softly, but somehow the words cut deep when he knows they should be repairing.  
  
“It’s not the same! No girl is ever going to love someone like me!”  
  
“Well you have to learn to love yourself before you can expect anyone else to love you back.”  
  
“I don’t just mean girls, I mean everyone. I can’t do anything right, I’m such a failure. Even Han knows it.” His mother winces when he opts to call his father by his first name. He croaks out in the smallest whisper, “I’m never going to fit in, am I?”  
  
“My little prince, there’s so much space in the Galaxy you don’t have to fit in anywhere,” she plants a small kiss on his forehead and tousles his hair. She opens the curtains to let in the evening light before she leaves the room.

* * *

 

“Ben! Listen to your mother!” Han wails at him from the galley, his arm wrapped around what he’s constantly trying to convince him is his wife. Ben might be a stranger to love but he’s wise enough to know you have to at least be present in her life to earn the title of spouse.  
  
“It’s her fault! You said it yourself… She’s too over-protective! She’s holding me back!” When he feels the tears of rage burning behind his eyes he turns so Han won’t be able to see, striding out onto the balcony and force-slamming the door behind him.

“How dare you talk about your mother that way! Do you have any idea what she—what _we_ have sacrificed for you? Do you have any idea what you’re saying?” Han barrels outside after him.  
  
“Do you?” He whips around to face him, brutal and steaming and his mother clutched crying on the doorframe.  
  
“Don’t get smart with me! It’s not my fault you’re a terrible pilot! Maybe if you’d have worked a damn day in your life you could have been something!” Han is blistering with rage, and so is he. 

“I never even wanted to be a damn pilot! If you’d have been with us for a single day instead of gallivanting off like some washed up hero on the edges of the Rishi Maze you would have known that! You have no idea how hard I’ve worked!” Ben can’t help it anymore, he’s crying now.

“Oh and now you’re going to cry? Grow up, Ben!”

“I HATE YOU!”

And suddenly, Han looks like his heart’s been pierced through the heart and Ben can’t help when his face relaxes out of anger. He feels like he’s five again, ripping open the paper on his new rebel helmet under his father’s gaze. But it hurts this time.  
  
“All I ever wanted to be was a Jedi…” He looks to his mother. His voice feels small when he says it.

“Ben…” His mother’s voice is soft, gentle. As it always is. As it has always been. She wraps her arms around him, and he pulls her tight to his chest. He doesn’t remember when he became tall enough to envelop her so thoroughly and suddenly he remembers that she’s fragile. That she’s been hurt enough after all this fighting that she doesn’t need his troubles too. He feels ashamed.  
  
“I’m sorry, mom…” He whispers into her hair, looking up at Han with a gaze of molten steel over her head. He’s hurt her worse. Hurt them both worse.

“I’ll take him to Luke,” Han turns around and walks inside.

He’s fourteen years old.

  
That’s the last Ben speaks to either of them.

 

 

 

 


	5. Danse Macabre in G Minor, Op. 40 - Camille Saint-Saëns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How to Lose 5 Pounds in 5 Days: A Scientific Account of My Pain and Agony While Suffering Through the Norovirus  
> (aka the reason for my posting delays)
> 
> Not the most exciting chapter, I know, but a necessary one. I'm going to start posting shorter chapters to favor more frequent updates. Bitches love frequent updates.

Ben wasn’t exaggerating when he called Ahch-To “wet.” In fact, Rey considers in retrospect, the adjective is a gross understatement.  
  
“I didn’t know there was this much water in the whole galaxy,” she whispers reverently as the clouds break and her eyes open onto a limitless sea dotted with stony emerald isles the way exploded starships mark her orange sands on Jakku.  
  
Out of the corner of her eye, she catches something poignant and melancholy on Ben’s face at her words. But, like all fractures in his composure, it vanishes in an instant as though she’d dreamt it.  
  
The island and all her beauty that houses the staggering array of stone temple infrastructure hewn out of the basalt cliffs is captivating, but the rigorous training that starts the day after her arrival is all too sobering.  
  
Rey’s room inside the barracks is what one might liken to a cave on a bad day and no bigger than the space she’d carved out for herself in the AT-AT, but upon seeing the humble living conditions the order obstinately thrusts upon themselves she finds herself thankful to simply have a space to call her own. Her years hoarding her modest possessions on Jakku have left her wary of the concept of sharing.  
  
The room does, however, have an open-air window chiseled out of the wall, revealing a stories high drop to the lapping and churning seas bellow. It also possesses the rather frustratingly convenient feature of facing east. When the sun pours in the morning after her arrival, Rey jolts off the cot. How embarrassing, to be late on the first day.

She reaches for her desert rags, but remembers the beige and brown robes she’d been given yesterday perched neatly and still folded on top her humble chest of drawers. She moves to put them on and suddenly realizes they’re far more complex than they first appeared when draped around the other members of the temple compound.  
  
Rey binds her breasts with the flexible white bandages and pulls on the simple white fabric of what’s clearly the complementary half of the undergarments and contemplates the remaining pieces. She supposes the light and airy material is the bottom layer, and pulls on the loose fitting long sleeve and pants before attempting to fold the two thick layers of canvas properly over her body, holding it in place with the leather belt.  
  
It’s no use. The room has no mirror to help her efforts and if she fusses with it any longer she’ll truly be late. She sighs and drags on her leather boots, relishing briefly the feel of new shoes against her perpetually tired soles before huffing at her appearance and trudging off to the temple.  
  
Her cheeks flush as she ambles into the courtyard at last, seeing a group of children working through slow form work with a much older female Jedi, hair the color of blazing copper but graced with strands of silver. Rey immediately worries that maybe her disorientation has made her miss her class all together.  
  
“Oh, I’m sorry I must be lost,” Rey stumbles over her words, moving to back out gingerly as the group is now standing at attention, their focus clearly broken. The woman smiles up at her.  
  
“Ah, you must be Rey! Grandmaster Luke has told me all about you. I’m Grandmaster Jade. Class, can we all give a warm welcome to our newest member?” Grandmaster Jade speaks with a soft and warm intonation to the group and in clockwork unison they all turn and bow.

“Pleased to meet you Miss Rey!” The children coo.  
  
“Won’t you come join us?” She motions to the lawn where everyone is arranged in neat rows for practice.  
  
Rey soon realizes to her chagrin the class Grandmaster Luke has placed her in is filled with a splattering of younglings all sprinkled around the age of approximately ten. She looks like a floundering tree among graceful saplings as she ambles to trace the forms with the precision of the budding brats beside her. Brilliant.

In spite of her early fumbling, Rey makes incredibly substantial progress as the weeks wear on. She takes pride in her natural aptitude for the drills, but each morning when the searing pain of her muscle strains threaten to claw her body apart from the inside she can’t help but wish for the familiarity of her old life in these moments of quiet weakness. Grandmaster Jade assures her it is the by product of her body’s rapid changes—the strain of using muscles she’d ignored for years coupled with the massive influx of nutrients from her improved diet wrapping substance around her bones in place of just malnourished skin. She isn’t wrong, Rey realizes one day in the bath as she considers the healthy swollenness her cheeks have adopted since her arrival here.

Despite all her feats of rapid improvement, sparring days still frequently leave Rey sprawled out under the predatory paws of sea of pint-sized terrors. Part of her hates having her ass handed to her by a group of snickering little imps but the sensible part of her can’t stomach knocking her staff across the cheek of a creature that is hardly the height of her waist. Her progress is quickly becoming a real catch twenty-two.

The planet is reeling through its summer cycle at the moment and each day when the sun and mugginess become too intolerable for any real work to be done it seems the whole compound breaks for lunch in the great dining hall. The food is never worth writing home about, but at least they serve a rotation to keep a variety up. Not that Rey is one to complain—anything is better than portion vitamin bread. But, she finds that now she slows her scarfing to a rate patient enough to at least discern a few favorite foods.  
  
She’s sitting with her “classmates” whose feet don’t even reach the floor, dangling from the benches, (she winces every time their swinging boot toes make contact with her shins under the table) and praying for an escape from their petty, juvenile squabbling that has long since passed endearing when she spies him across the hall for the first time in days. Ben.  
  
He’s alone, picking through his food as he makes his way through the currents of people and Rey doesn’t fail to notice the way he carefully avoids even brushing contact with everyone he passes. His eyes don’t meet the ground, but they don’t make a move to meet anyone else’s either.  
  
“Hey!” What is she doing? Why is she doing this? “Hey, Ben!” She calls out, standing from the table and holding her hand out of the sea of beige and brown. He looks around confused as to where his name is coming from or whether he heard it at all before he spins in her direction.  
  
In a single moment she feels a hundred tiny fists bury themselves in her robes and drag her crashing back down to the table, murmuring and hissing at her in whispers with their heads crowded around hers. The younglings chide her in a flurry of tiny voices.

“What are you doing? Don’t you know who that is?”

“Yeah, that’s Ben,” Rey replies as if she were merely discussing the consistencies of the weather which judging by the horrified responses of her petite peers is clearly far from appropriate.  
  
“No, that’s _Master_ _Solo_. Master Ben Solo.” They warn is hushed voices.  
  
“Tch, Master Ben. Do they give anyone that title these days?” Rey rolls her eyes at the thought that he’s cultivated some kind of cult of respect around here. Really, who does he think he is? He might have the wool pulled over some youngling’s eyes but she’s not fooled.  
  
Some of them gasp. Others merely gawk. She’s almost certain though she hears one on the end of the table faint from the antipathy of it all.  
  
“He’s Han Solo’s _son_ and Grandmaster Skywalker’s _nephew_! He finished top of his class and became Grandmaster Skywalker’s padawan learner. I’ve never seen him lose a single sparring match. He’s the most powerful Jedi anyone’s ever seen in the academy. Some rumors say he’s even more powerful than Grandmaster Skywalker himself, but I’m not sure if I believe it,” one brave little boy dishes her the scoop in a hushed tone. The others follow suit with their own slew of rumors.  
  
“I heard he once killed four Rodian bounty hunters all by himself on a mission to D’Qar!” “Well _I_ heard he can use the force to levitate a whole x-wing!” “I heard he won a lightsaber duel with Master Kuiper Rengé while _blindfolded_!” “I heard he’s been known to experiment with the Dark Side of The Force!” “Well that’s _definitely_ just a rumor!”  
  
“Would you all just be quiet!” One little girl’s voice rises up among the many. “Those are all just stupid rumors, but what is most definitely true is that Master Solo is the absolute meanest in all the Galaxy and you’re too nice, Miss Rey, you don’t need to talk to him at all.”  
  
The others all murmur in agreement of how Ben is “the meanest in all the Galaxy” and Rey is certainly not one to argue that point. But when he walks by the table, her eyes meet his dark and brooding gaze and he gives her the slightest nod of acknowledgement. Her cheeks flush, praying he knows nothing of their conversation at the table despite her awareness of the impossibility. He stalks off out of the dining hall, presumably to find someplace more peaceful to take his noon rest. She can’t help but be jealous of his situation as her eyes lose him in the crowd and she turns back to her rejoin her callow comrades. 

* * *

 The moons wax and wane tirelessly over the island, dragging the tides in and out with their constructively and destructively interfering pulls and the sea level bobs up and down ceaselessly around the island in reply, keeping time with their movements. Two standard months have gone by since she’s arrived at the temple and Rey finds that she’s begun to craft not only a life but also a name for herself here.

When Grandmaster Jade has her moved to the advanced class so quickly, at first Rey is ecstatic to finally be free of the humiliation of working with a group of pupils half her age. Now, she will be free to compete for one of the select few spots as a padawan learner to one of the Jedi knights. But when she sees the shifting eyes and hears the callous mutterings from her new peers the first day, she suddenly finds herself wishing for the relative amity she’d won over from the younglings.  
  
The crowd goes stiff and all heads whip in her direction as she enters the room and Rey wonders to herself if she could really hear the buzzing cane fly from across the room through the tense silence or if was some nerve-wracked manufacturing in her mind. The students she’s with today are still her juniors, but only in age and certainly not in size or seniority. They appear to be all about 15 to 16 years old, from a host of different races. The group is larger, too; close to two dozen all competing for maybe five spots as a padawan. She notes in her anxiety that unlike the younglings, each has a deadly, handcrafted lightsaber latched to their hip.  
  
Their eyes bore into her as she makes her way across the room as though they were looking to slice choice cuts of tauntaun meat off her skeleton. Grandmaster Luke might preach a philosophy of detachment and rejection of petty emotions like jealousy but it’s clear, she thinks from under the spiteful glares of her competition, that those words of wisdom are not as frequently heeded as he lets on.  
  
Rey swallows her fear whole, turns her chin up, and manufactures a durasteel façade. These other students have been training their entire lives to compete for these apprenticeships—she’s had mere weeks to learn what they’ve been perfecting since they started breathing. It doesn’t help her case that she’s old, either. At twenty, she’s far older than almost anyone who’s been taken on as a padawan. Her prospects look grim.

Her new instructor for these last painful weeks building up to the padawan trials, she learns, will be Grandmaster Luke himself. His cherry-picked advanced class has been his personal project for nearly a decade, but now Rey watches the sparring matches between former friends hounding ruthlessly upon each other for their opportunity to shine before their master. There’s no room for alliances anymore.

Rey’s hand shoots up to her mouth as she watches a blonde haired boy take a wooden backhand to the kidney from a precision-mastered Togruta girl, collapsing under the weight of his own body.

“Yield!” She cries. Murmurs run through the class and the crowds that have amassed, full of temple passer-bys, eager to gossip about the odds and prospects of who will be chosen by which Master in the coming trials.

“Why hold the trials like this?” Rey whispers to Grandmaster Luke, seated beside her on the risers, towering high on one end of the central temple floor. “I thought competition went against the code of the order?”

“Be careful, young one. Competition is not in violation of our code. It is the things that rise from it if one is not careful—hate, rage, jealousy, frustration—that are. It takes a dedicated padawan to resist the pull of the Dark Side under stresses like these, one with great strength of will and devotion to character. These traits are far more important in an apprentice than mere regimented talent alone. Often times, these weeks leading up to the trials are more revealing than the trials themselves.”  
  
He tells her this, but nods to the floor where another fight has ended with one boy landing a stroke across the bloodied cheek of another. From the pained and distraught look on his assailant’s face, it’s clear the two pitted against each other were close friends. Grandmaster Luke continues.

“That, and sometimes our most daunting enemies can spring forth from our most beloved friends,” and for a moment his blue eyes grow icy and distant, staring off at some indeterminable fixed point in space. “A Jedi must always be strong enough to complete what he is called to do, despite his attachments.” 

“Did you tell the others this?” Rey questions after it seems he’s found his way home from the distant lands of reverie.

“No.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Same reason I asked you to abandon your life on Jakku.” He gestures to the open floor and Rey swallows her nerves hard. It’s her turn.


	6. Beyond - Daft Punk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, a HUGE thank you to all my dedicated readers. New ones too, but especially y'all who continue to come back time and time again for this trash and most especially those of you who drop comments. I might not always reply but nothing in this world gets me more hype so thank you.
> 
> Second, science is hard. So is math. I am always tired. Don't be a scientist, it's like being an artist but with more headaches. Trust me. I'm a scientist. 
> 
> Pronunciation note:  
> Kuiper Rengé : K-eye'-pur Ren'-gay (You know, like that cosmological asteroid field out past Pluto, the Kuiper Belt)

Ben heaves a heavy groan from the depths of his chest, and presses his palms over the salty skin of his cheeks and upwards to shove the tacky, sopping strands of black hair off his face. He shuts his eyes and listens to the pattering of the rain falling on his body and the earth he’s sprawled out on. He should have known afternoon meditation would have been a futile exercise—and not just because of the violent storms that habitually roll over the island at the close of the muggy summer days.

Finding a clear mind was never his strong suit, but lately Ben finds that every time he tries to bleed his conscious mind free of belaboring reflections, thoughts of the damned sand rat cling in dark corners, too out of reach to brush aside. When nothing else is there to occupy his mind those same thoughts blaze in the forefront just behind his eyes.

Ben will admit to himself only in these moments of blind frustration when his nails dig into his palms near the point of drawing blood at his desperation to ignore her that his current struggle isn’t entirely unlike his time at the academy all those years ago when the face of Kædé swam endlessly in his memories.  
  
But that was a crush, and his feelings towards that arrogant Jakku trash compactor were about as far away from affection as possible. Unless of course the sort of crush being referenced was the “I want to crush her into a thousand pieces and feed her to a school of Firaxan sharks” kind of crush. That was a very accurate description of his feelings towards the girl.  
  
When his mind summons memories of her against his will, the rumors about her prodigious skill make Ben’s blood boil and seethe with jealousy. How dare she, a girl with no dynastic blood, truly a nobody from a backwater junkyard in the Western Reaches, be gifted with a command of The Force that should have been his by birthright!  
  
Ben had never been prodigious, despite what had been promised him by his mother and uncle. He’d had to earn every inch of progress he’d managed to scrape together to cultivate his reputation as the perfect padawan with blood, sweat, and tears. Everything he had slaved his life to become, his perfection, suddenly seemed to be made of glass as rumors flew about the girl. The girl, who many seemed to believe, was the most gifted padawan to ever arrive at the academy.  
  
Still, woven between the whisperings he’s picked up around the temple are the oddest string of images and sensations. A selection of favorite snapshots playing over and over again like a looped holo-reel in his mind’s eye.

Her eyes, the only green on the entire planet when he first meets her. The way her robes never sit right because she’s too stubborn to ask how to tie them properly. Her tongue, flicking out over her dried and sunburnt lips like a lizard’s in the desert. Her hands clutching at his chest when he nearly loses her in the subterranean wreckage. Her wiry figure towering over the sea of younglings. And, he’s loath to admit, the time he catches her drilling forms without any of her top robes and only her bindings on in the height of the summer heat.

The worst offender, however, is the simplest memory from the quiet morning on Jakku. They’re inside the AT-AT as he watches her fasten back her chestnut hair into her characteristic triple buns. The memory fixates around this strand of hair her nimble fingers skate over and fail to pull back with the rest of the locks. This strand of hair, strewn against her temple, he knows she’ll have to take her hair down and redo it to fix the offending piece. He knows because the memory winds through his head over and over again with this burning compulsion to just _push the piece back_. Like a broken record, each time it resets the aching pull to reach out and move it burns hotter than the last. The preoccupation is senseless, to want to change a memory so mundane but the urge to right it… it would be so _easy,_ he thinks, to fix it. A simple grazing touch—over in an instant. Just push it back behind her ear. But the image of the single tousled strand of hair rubs against his psyche like a grain of sand inside an oyster because memories can’t be changed.

Maybe Rey is beautiful, he concedes, but so are many other women and this objective fact of her physical allure does nothing to earn her any favor from him. In fact, it only makes him hate her more. Ben hates beautiful things in the exact sense Uncle Luke meant when he said that hating things corrupts the soul. He wants to be among them, but is trapped being himself. He wants to possess them, but is stuck with what he’s been given. So he settles for the contempt of them in a hollow facsimile of satisfaction.

He doesn’t want to think about Rey anymore. He never wants to think about her to begin with, but in this instance he’s given his subconscious too much free reign in the explorative department and the things being dredged up are making him feel very uncomfortable with himself. He pries his body off the ground and starts making his way back towards the temple.  
  
The rain is coming down in driving sheets now, and when Ben crosses the threshold into the temple, candle light dances orange and yellow off the stone corridors and the rain and thunder sounds distant beyond the open archways. His wool robes smell like wet wookiee and he strips down to no shirt and just his pants to avoid the rank odor, slinging his discarded clothes over the open windowsill with a wet _thwop_. He’s almost surprised there’s no fish swimming out of his boots when he floods the floor with their watery contents, abandoning them with the rest of his clothes. He’ll come back for them later.  
  
As he makes his way through the labyrinth of inner halls, he hears a ruckus coming from the direction of the central temple floor. He spies Kuiper Rengé and some of the other knights leaning over the balcony, engrossed in watching what must be a sparring match occurring below, judging by the characteristic contact sounds of wood against wood, stone, and flesh. They must be eyeing their prospective choices for apprentices.

“Solo!” Rengé spins around, his bony elbows propped up behind him as he leans back against the railing. “You’re missing out on all the action, as always.”

“The trials haven’t even started yet and you all are already palavering over nothing,” Ben holds up for a moment, not wanting to be entirely rude. He wouldn’t call Rengé a friend—Ben doesn’t exactly have friends—but he’s a tolerable acquaintance at least.

“Aww, come on! It feels like only yesterday it was you and me down there!” He lets out a good-humored chuckle. The floor below has gone quiet for the moment, but the other knights are huddled over the balcony, still goading one another about the odds and prospects of this year’s class.

“And as I recall, I won that fight,” Ben fails to suppress his smirk when he references their infamous match. He and Rengé had been in the same padawan class.

“What can I say, I wasn’t lucky enough to be born a Skywalker,” Rengé scoffs. 

“I was blindfolded,” He replies. The banter is innocent, but the fact that even after all these years his peers still write off his success as some byproduct of his blood still rubs him the wrong way. Ben moves to stalk off to the showers.

“Leaving so soon?” Rengé follows after him.

“I have no interest in taking on an apprentice,” There’s no faltering when he says it but his fellow knight starts in on him anyway. This is why Ben prefers to be alone.

“Force and fates, Solo, it’s been five years since you passed the knight trials. You could be nearly done training two padawans by now! The order is so small as it is, we all have to do our part to help keep it alive.”

“I have no interest in taking on an apprentice _ever._ ”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. But regardless, I think you’ll be at the very least intrigued to watch the match that’s slated to go next,” Rengé nods his head to the happenings below where Rey is about to take the floor.  
  
Ben feels his breath hitch in his throat, and he should probably just walk away now but he’s nothing if he’s not hopeless when it comes to anything involving the prodigy girl from Jakku. He leans over the balcony next to Rengé to watch the action unfold.

He eyes her as she moves from next to Uncle Luke to the stand that holds the wooden training weapons, running her hands along their surfaces before she settles on a heavy, oaken staff taller than she is, turning it over in her hands to get a feeling for the balance.

“That’s a bold move, Solo, let’s see if it pays off for her,” Rengé chuckles a bit, clearly lacking faith in her amateur ability to wield the notoriously difficult weapon, but he isn’t acquainted with the same Rey that Ben is. He only knows the prodigious padawan, not the scrappy sand rat, fighting for her life on the daily with nearly the exact same staff.  
  
Her opponent, a bulky boy with at least 80 pounds on her, smirks as he grabs his sparring sword, clearly of the same mind as Ben’s companion.  
  
He surprises himself when a small smile escapes him. “We’ll see.”  
  
Suddenly, Ben realizes he wants so desperately for her to win. On some surface level he repeats to himself again and again that he hates her, that he wants to see her fail, but inside he knows that’s not the truth. Something his Uncle Luke once said comes to mind, that envy is merely admiration in those too proud to admit it. He pushes the thought away. Surely he’s better than all that.

Rey and her opponent bow to each other across the center of the floor before drawing their weapons. It doesn’t hold quite the same dramatic effect as the saber ignition, Ben considers, but they can’t exactly have the padawans hacking at each other and doing permanent damage. That would be a bit too dark, even for Uncle Luke’s more tolerant and modern approach to the order.

The central temple floor is open and well-lit and the boy adopts a broad, open Ataru stance. A classic move to chose the acrobatic style for this setting, but Rey undoubtedly has him bested on agility. Her maneuvers, however, are far more indiscernible. Ben isn’t quite sure weather she’s doing it to be unpredictable or if she simply isn’t sure what she’s doing at all. While her opponent’s steps are wide and sure, hers are light, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she crosses them one over the other and stalks feline circles around her prey.

“Is that a Niman stance?” Rengé sounds honestly a bit perplexed as he says it. “How… undisciplined.”  
  
“Not an entirely poor choice if she intends to wield that staff like a double bladed saber,” Ben counters.  
  
What he’s thinking, though, is that despite the form’s negative reputation the scrappy, mixed style fits her personality brilliantly. Besides, he has a personal fondness for the form himself and is generally bitter at the bad wrap it receives. Almost no one besides him thinks to use it. Ben feels a little tug inside his chest and he pulls his hand up to meet it. He keeps his face of stone so Rengé is left none the wiser. 

Rey holds her staff balanced at the center, curiously weighted against her hip as she moves in contrast to her opponent who never fails to keep his pseudo-saber fixed between his body and his enemy’s. Again, a very prototypical move on the boy’s part—the textbook strategies he would have been drilled on in his classes over the years until they became muscle memory.

His choices are safe, but predictable. Unfortunately, Ben considers, Rey lacks the years tactical experience to capitalize on this critical weakness in her opponent. She’ll have to best him on some front other than insight into his movements if she expects to emerge victorious.  
  
Their blades knock against each other as each anticipates the other’s motion like partners in a particularly brutal choreographed dance. The tension breaks as the boy mounts a quick forward assault, but Rey is quicker. Her blade pinwheels past her cheek, catching his blows stride for stride with alternating faces of her staff. He nearly catches her in the ribs but she’s aware of the opening she’s left on her side and moves to block the strike before he even knows he’s going to make the move himself.

“Brilliant use of foresight, hard to stay focused enough in The Force to look ahead in the midst of a fight. I have to say, the girl’s got a gift,” Rengé comments but Ben is too absorbed at the moment to reply.  
  
Their blades lock on the shaft, hands and hilts pressed against one another, with their faces inches apart. Neither has the range of motion to move out of the rigid position at the moment, and Rey is forced to take steps back to compensate for the boy’s weight shoving full force against her. Ben sees her bite her lip, eyes darting left and right as her mind races to find the next move.  
  
Rey sweeps the low end of her staff under her opponent’s feet and parries to the right with her top half, forcing her opponent off balance. She takes advantage of her opening and skims a point on his outer bicep, forcing them apart beyond arm’s length again. It leaves little affliction, but it lets him know she means business.

If the boy had been merely feeling her out in the early minutes of the fight, he certainly isn’t now. Rey has only a few moments to think before her assailant rains a flurry of crosswise blows around her. He swings dual-handed, clearly taking advantage of his superior size to dominate her where he knows he can’t best her in speed. The wooden clashes ring out across the hall as Rey is driven backward despite her best efforts to hold her ground. Ben sees the sweat collecting on her brow as she adopts a defensive stance, a damage control strategy rather than an offense.

The boy catches her left arm hard near the elbow, and Ben notices her counters on that side are growing subtly more sluggish. The blow must have really left a mark and he’s certain her competition hasn’t failed to notice this, too.  
  
“She needs to give up this damned Niman stance and adopt something more conventional, defensive,” Rengé supplies. “He can’t keep this up for a whole fight. She might have a chance if she can outlast him on stamina, counter once he’s winded.” 

“She’s hurt bad, she’ll never last like that…” Ben consciously suppresses the subtle intonation of concern in his voice.

“She is?”

“Left arm. Watch her backhand parry. See? There,” Ben nods as she falters almost imperceptibly from the force when their blades next make contact. “She needs to make a move, and fast, before it gives out completely. She’s slippery as snot, her best move would be to out speed him catch him on the inside, land a decisive blow to his head or torso before he can set up for the next strike.”

“Bold, but if she doesn’t play it just right the match is over for her. And since when are you such an expert on underdog tactics, Darth Eternally Victorious?”

“I don’t think that abides by the classic Sith naming conventions, but it certainly has a nice ring to it.”

No sooner had they finished speaking when the boy draws his blade up over his head for a decisive downward blow. Rengé lets out a hiss under his breath and Ben feels his fingers tighten nervously around the balcony railing, anticipating what might happen but unable to tear his eyes away.  
  
At the last feasible moment, Rey knots her left hand into a fist and catches the throat of her opponent in a vice grip of The Force. She jerks her arm back with a grunt, lurching the front of his body forward with the inertia of his strike. She bobs right and the boy is in freefell towards a face plant on the temple floor when she whips the staff from behind her figure, backhanding him straight to the gut. Had that been a real saber she’d have cauterized his intestines and left him in two even halves on the floor.

The boy gasps and wheezes desperately for oxygen on the ground like a fish out of water and Rey heaves and pants, too, with hands on her knees. She looks quite winded herself after that match. The whole temple floor erupts into a thunderous applause and Ben sees a suppressed smile of pride creep onto her lips. She deserves to be proud, he surrenders finally.

“How did she… is that even legal, using Force techniques in a battle like that? I’ve never seen anything like it!” Rengé is thoroughly dumbfounded and a little peeved, judging by his tone.

“Legal? Do you think a patron of the Dark Side will be particularly concerned with some arbitrary rules of honor and engagement when he drives a saber through the back of your skull? Consider everything fair game, Rengé,” Ben supplies, eyes never leaving Rey as some of her hypocritical classmates give her congratulatory pats on the back. How shallow. “And of course you wouldn’t have seen it before. A compound move like that is pure Niman.”

“She’s a virtuoso of creativity.”

“No, she’s simply not afraid to break the rules.”

“It doesn’t matter, you still have to learn the rules first before you can break them properly. She’s got a long way to go…” Rengé’s eyes narrow a bit as he watches the class like a hawk. “She might have raw talent, but she’s not disciplined. I wouldn’t take her as my apprentice.”

“Well I guess for her sake it’s a good thing Klaes isn’t ready to face the trials yet.”

“Oh, Solo, you wouldn’t happen to be implying anything about the fate of the girl, would you?” Rengé smirks like he knows something Ben doesn’t.

“I told you I don’t take apprentices.”

“Maybe you should reconsider, you’ve always had a crow’s eye for pretty, broken trinkets.”  
  
Ben hardens when he hears him talk about Rey that way. He might not have the kindest words for her in the privacy of his own mind, but somehow he feels angry and defensive when he hears someone else dare to criticize her. His fists tighten at his sides but his face reads no more emotion than it did before. He knows if he lets Rengé get a rise out of him his famous temper will only make the situation worse.

“Maybe you should focus on the apprentice you do have instead of getting tied up in the affairs of this year’s class. Force alive, I swear when you scamps get together you gossip worse than a court of handmaidens.”

Ben leaves that one to hang in the air and Rengé laughs characteristically to diffuse the mounting tensions.

“Relax, Solo, it’s just a joke. No need to make it personal,” He smiles and claps Ben on the shoulder.

“I’m going to the showers,” A new match is starting now on the floor and he pulls himself away from the railing and runs his fingers through his hair the way he always tends to do when he’s thinking hard about something.

“Well, I’ll see you around then. Don’t be such a stranger,” Rengé tosses him a casual wave as he makes his way back to rave about the match with the other knights. 

* * *

 

The rain sloughs from the sky tirelessly for three straight days. Ben wonders how so much water could possibly even be contained in a single low-pressure system, but when he remembers the seas stretching out to the horizon in all directions suddenly the weather patterns don’t seem so completely unbelievable anymore. 

The ground floor of the temple has mild flooding nearly everywhere, leaving the higher levels densely packed with the temple’s inhabitants milling about their daily business indoors instead of out. It’s loud and packed now as the monk-like order typically makes habitual use of the outside spaces since the weather remains reasonably temperate year-round here on the island.

Ben is beginning to feel claustrophobic from the stifling atmosphere his small personal room provides. It’s nothing like any of his rooms were growing up and it’s probably the thing he misses the most about being home. Ben likes to be alone, but times like this when he can’t hike out to some remote corner of the island make that difficult. He tries to meditate but he can here the yowling of the younglings running up and down the halls even with his door shut. It feels as though the walls are closing in on him and Ben wonders how people like Han can last virtually their entire lives cooped up in some damned starship.

Finally, he surrenders. It’s the summer cycle still and the rain at least won’t be cold. He throws on some canvas robes instead of the wool because even if they’re hotter they don’t smell as bad wet. He groans as he puts them on. Why does every choice of fabric offered have to be so itchy? At least black was among the three color options along with bantha shit brown and zero personality beige.

Veritable creeks have sprung up all over the place as a result of water draining towards the ocean via the path of least resistance and with every step he takes Ben feels himself slipping or sinking into the mud. He trudges towards some higher ground. There’s a section he recalls by the cliffs where the dirt has been worn away by the weather over the years and the basalt beneath sits naked in broad swaths on the ground. He might be exposing himself to the elements by choice but he’d rather not shower caked mud off his skin at the close of the day.

He’s on the last terrace of those godforsaken uneven stone stairs that span the temple complex when he hears two familiar voices coming from the next landing. The first is unmistakably his Uncle Luke. He doesn’t think he knows a single voice in the Galaxy better than he knows that one. The second however is feminine, flighty, with unusual intonations and an exotic accent. Rey.

He didn’t really plan to eavesdrop on their conversation, but here he is nonetheless, hiding behind the rubble of some long collapsed pillars that once housed some expansion of the temple. The rain is pouring, making it a bit difficult to hear what they’re saying, but he does.

“Rey, you should know there is such a thing as overtraining,” Uncle Luke speaks to her gingerly, and Ben can almost see him staring at her with his typical warning gaze, arms folded over his body and tucked suspiciously in his draped robe sleeves.

“Not when you’re as far behind the others as I am,” He can hear her footsteps, sporadic but well timed over the cobblestones. She’s running forms. 

“You should take a break. If you strain your muscles too much they won’t have time to grow properly. Or worse, you’ll hurt yourself and won’t be able to do anything. You’re body needs its rest, but more than that, so does your mind.”

Ben hears her stop for a moment.

“I have a few weeks to learn what the other students have dedicated their entire lives to perfecting. Even minutes are precious now—there’s only so many of them between today and the padawan trials. I’ll rest when I’m dead.” He hears her start her form again, from the beginning. He recognizes it from the musical beats her feat make as she circles her imaginary foe around the terrace.

Uncle Luke hums pensively to himself and lets out a breathy laugh. “I suppose that all life demands struggle. We should be grateful when we’re gifted with challenges. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid are the major building blocks in the person we are today. Your determination and commitment to your personal improvement is your greatest asset, Rey.” He pauses for a moment, and when he starts again his voice is laced with something suspect. “Just like somebody else I know.”

Ben’s breath catches in his throat, worrying that he’s been found out. But if Uncle Luke is aware of his presence, he makes no move to point it out.

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks,” She keeps moving. Ben snickers soundlessly. It seems Rey has about as much vested interest in Uncle Luke’s cryptic Jedi knowledge as he does. He can’t fault her.

“You remind me of a very old friend,” He continues, ignoring her subtle shade. “Although I suppose that’s to be expected. Some traits are learned, but others are most certainly inherited.”

She stops dead in her tracks this time. “What are you talking about? Did you…” Her voice is soft and low when she speaks. “Did you know my mother?”

“Not personally, no. But your grandfather was something of a mentor to me. Perhaps even more than that, he was like the father to me that my own father was too torn and corrupted to be.”

Ben isn’t even sure if he’s breathing at all anymore. He couldn’t possibly mean… There’s certainly no way that…

“Obi-Wan Kenobi was a man of true loyalty and character, and one of the greatest men that I have ever known. It’s been an honor to have a hand in salvaging his lineage.”

The object of his preoccupation is the direct descendant of his namesake, his own grandfather’s master and closest friend. How fucking poetic…

“Obi-Wan Kenobi… The hero of the Old Republic and the last of the surviving Jedi… was my grandfather?” She lays out the impossible facts with the voice of disbelief that Ben feels himself.

“Search your feelings, Rey. Open your heart and your mind to the call of The Force. You know it to be true.”

“Is that why you came to Jakku? To find me, because of my dead grandfather?”

“Death is merely an illusion, the only existence is The Force. If you quiet your mind, Rey, perhaps your grandfather will guide your path as he has done mine.”

Ben hears her unleash an unholy sigh of frustration. He’s all too familiar with the circles that conversations with Uncle Luke tend to run in. And the “open your mind and let your grandfather guide you” is the most bogus advice on this side of the Galaxy. Ben’s been knocking on that door for over a decade and the closest to guidance he’s received is the infuriating, ever-present tug of the darkness at the back of his mind. Thanks, Anakin.

Enigmatic Jedi wisdom aside, the revelation cuts Ben’s image of Rey deep to the core. All these months he’s been raging against this manufactured image of the arrogant, prodigious sand rat and how easy her life must be here at the temple, enduring praise for some raw talent she never even earned.  
  
But after seeing her slaving over forms in the rain, the detestation she receives from her peers at her victories, and now her impossible legacy, matching the magnitude of absurdly unattainable brilliance of his own he considers the shattered reflection of what he assumed her to be beside what she is.

The rain whispers against his goose fleshed skin and when Uncle Luke leaves her to her own devices, all Ben hears is her movements, his own breathing, and the sounds of the storm raging between them. He feels a pang of something like guilt tear painfully through his chest when he hears her tired body pick up the forms again.  
  


Maybe they aren’t so different after all.


	7. I'll Fall - bo en, Coris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These next couple chapters were rough to get up because I couldn't decide what order I wanted the events to happen in. Pretty short one. My sincere apologies, I hope to have another chapter up this week though. Thank you as always, my faithful trash compactor readership! (: 
> 
> PS -- chill with me on tumblr I post a metric fuckton of reylo and general tfa [talladeganights](http://talladeganights.tumblr.com/)

Perhaps it’s merely some fabrication of her imagination or wishful thinking, but Rey swears she spies Ben lurking behind nearly every turn in the temple recently. Granted this is true hyperbole and shouldn’t strike her as all too bizarre since her move to the advanced competitive class lends itself to training in areas she formerly had no reason to frequent, but something about their close encounters rings a bit contrived in her instincts.

In this particular moment, the night wanes and yields to the soft lavender skies of the dawn, flecked with the silhouettes of sea birds carried on the breezes of the gentle morning, the calm after the storms have finally swept beyond the horizon. Rey carries herself heavenward over the heaving stairs of the temple’s exterior to the skyscraping cliffs that tower high over the ocean. She tastes the salt of her skin mixed with that of the sea, wild twines of hair circling her face as the wind picks up with her approach on the island’s meridian height.

Rey has always been one to rise before the sun, making precious use of the cool hours of the morning before the blistering, unproductive heat could settle over the sands of her desert. Plutt was right, it seems, about leaving—old habits do die hard, even after you’re gone.

She crests the last of the stairs, noting to herself with small internal praise that this time she’s hardly panting as she ends her ascent. A stark contrast to her anguished collapse after her first hike. Since then, these cliffs have become a habitual morning training spot, if for nothing more than the pride of conquering their height. The simple victories she’s won piece by piece against her own body and will since her arrival feel the most glorious.

She draws a calming breath, willing her arms to graze the edges of impossibly high, wispy clouds above her head. The crackling ripple of joints that cascades down her spine with her exhale is an anodyne to her unrelenting aches, albeit a temporary one.

“Damn.”

An accurate expletive to attach to the feeling, only she’s not the one who says it.

Rey’s eyes snap open even though she doesn’t need to see him to know who the voice belongs to. She doesn’t know how she didn’t sense him on her arrival; her thoughts must have been drifting, unfocused. He’s not entirely difficult to miss, though. Despite the warm light of the dawn flooding the encapsulated world between them, Ben still manages to obscure himself in the shadows behind the few notable weatherworn boulders marking the summit.

“Sounds like it hurt,” He prompts again, stepping towards her, eyes squinting a bit as he moves into the cast of the morning sun. “Been getting your ass handed to you lately, then?”

“And dealing it back twice as hard,” She intends her response to be snappy, but it comes out with a smile. She’s in too good a mood from the cleared weather to nip at his ego this morning. He scoffs.

“What are you, ninety pounds soaking wet? I’ll believe it when I see it,” that’s what his words say, but he’s smiling too.

“Ouch, that means so much coming from a featherweight punk like you. I had a malnourished youth, what’s your excuse?” Scratch that bit about the nipping, he’s too fun to get a rise out of. Let the record show he started it, though. The chess match of button pushing banter has turned into something of a game between them, and Rey often finds she’s unsure which backhanded jabs are real and which aren’t anymore.

“I don’t recall you thinking that back on Jakku.”

“You’re going to milk that encounter for all it’s worth, aren’t you?”

“At least until I get a proper thank you.”

“Don’t bet the starship on it,” Rey notices as they’re blabbering on that Ben has his cloak thrown across his shoulders, black of course like his hair and eyes and everything else he throws on his body.  
  
She wonders absently if he’s ever so much as entertained the notion of a color palette. Maybe analogous color schemes involve too many variables for his simplicity to grasp. Maybe he just thinks he looks edgy. Probably the latter. Dork.

The air has lost all of its briskness by this hour, though, and the rest of his clothes aren’t exactly conducive to any sort of sparring practice. He must have been here really early—early enough to still be considered night by the sanest of temple members. Probably meditating, which means she interrupted him. Rey feels a little apologetic.

Ben quips something back at her but she doesn’t catch it. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb your peace,” Rey breaks out of their recursive insult loop. Or tries to, at least. “Not that you have a shred tranquility in your whole body to begin with.”

“Because you’re clearly the picture of focus, blindsided by someone standing straight in front of you.”

“I assumed I’d be alone, I didn’t realize this was such a coveted morning training spot,” Rey says as she moves to head back down the stairs she just came up. Joyful. He catches her gaze again with something like a wily smirk.

“It isn’t.”

* * *

 

As it so happens, life at the temple isn’t all work and no play. Rey figures that would get dull, even for a workaholic like her but especially for the younglings. Rey inhales the breeze passing over the courtyard in earnest, enjoying the few restful moments she manages to snag here during her lunch hour. She’s taken to avoiding the cluster of the mess hall since her transfer to the advanced class and instead embraces the pseudo-solitude of the gardens.

Today, however, her reverie is shattered by the piercing squeals of Grandmaster Jade’s variegated flock of younglings, her former classmates.

“Miss Rey!” A few of them call out to her in a sing-song of excited voices. They race over to her in a flurry of laughter and uncoordinated limbs, tiny fingers nesting in her hair and robes and skin before forcing her to her feet.

“Miss Rey! Miss Rey! We never get to play with you anymore, you’re always so busy, don’t you love us at all?” They drag her from her place under the awnings to the center of the patio where the remainder of their little band is transfixed by a game of stunstick, the firm, rubbery ball bobbing around a collection of bruised and scratched kid legs. Rey lets out a giggle when one of them barrels into her, not watching where he was going.

“Of course she still loves us!” A familiar, trill little girl voice affirms. “Miss Rey trains really hard and she’s going to be the best Jedi Knight in the whole wide Galaxy, it’s not her fault she’s busy all the time!”

Rey blushes at the youngling’s praises and beaming expressions. “Well I don’t know about all that—“

Their little reunion is interrupted as the stunstick ball goes reeling into the lunch of one of the rare patrons to the courtyard with a clamor of flying food and smashed and mangled ceramics. The younglings jump with terror and crowd around Rey’s legs like a group of frightened, flightless birds. Rey feels the weight of a larger than youngling hand settle on her shoulder.

“It is usually best to admit mistakes when they occur and to seek forgiveness,” Grandmaster Skywalker chimes from behind Rey with an undercurrent of laughter behind his serious intonation. She hears the unholy furious wailing coming from a certain knight with his black robes covered in blue milk and faamba delight. “But not this time. Run!”

The younglings scatter before he has even finished his sentence, knowing not to brave the infamous white-hot wrath of Master Solo. Rey winces as she hears him smash the remnant pieces of the plates under foot, unleashing a string of curses at the sky, himself, and the fleeing children.

“Oh shut up already, being a dick won’t make yours any bigger!” Grandmaster Skywalker prods exasperatedly at his nephew, probably the only one in the entire compound besides Rey with the gall to serve such a comment.

“Well if it isn’t sand rat one and sand rat two, what a matched set,” Ben lobs back at them, trying hopelessly to get the ground food out of his robes and only making the situation worse in the process. “Fuck off for once, would you?” 

“Well, that’s no way for a Knight to talk in front of a Padawan, is it?” Grandmaster Skywalker’s resolve is comparable to a rock in a hurricane. He seems to take the whole situation in a comical light. Ben does not.

“Don’t let her fool you with that innocent friend-to-the-younglings act, she’s a sharp-tongued devil, worse than R2 even,” Ben’s cheeks must be red from embarrassment as well as fury, his wit’s not as sharp as it usually is. Rey laughs, shaking her head at the absurdity of his frustration and Grandmaster Skywalker slips his arm around hers, guiding her in the direction of the gardens and leaving his nephew to brood by his lonesome. Ben calls after her, something about staying away from that crazy old man and his mandatory piggyback rides in the swamp. Whatever that means. 

“His highness the charming prince of Alderaan seems to have taken quite the shine to you,” Grandmaster Skywalker starts when they’re finally well out of earshot.

“What are you talking about, he hates me!” Rey is floored that he would even suggest such a thing after witnessing that last exchange and their entire visit to Jakku.

“He acknowledges your presence, that is the closest thing to affection Ben exercises. Believe me,” He sighs wistfully. “I’m the only genuine friend the boy has ever known.”

“By the way he carries himself I’m certainly far from surprised.”

“Many things that seem threatening in the dark become welcoming when we shine light on them,” Here he is, starting in with the Jedi wisdom. Rey never seems to know which bush his riddles are be beating around.

“He’s the damned lamppost at the end of Satan’s driveway, it would take the light of a binary system to make him look less of a monster.”

“I do share his bloodline, you know.”

“Sorry,” Rey cringes at her prior comment. Maybe she shouldn’t be speaking with the leader of their entire Order about the issue of his pathetic, infuriating nephew quite so casually.

“Don’t be, it’s simply his nature. The young prince fancies himself a martyr, for what I couldn’t tell you,” As he continues, Grandmaster Skywalker drags Rey through some of the garden’s most beautiful greenery. Flowers and leaves of all shapes and colors litter the expanse. He settles by a collection of perfectly cultivated jade roses and Rey wonders if he could use The Force to tell they are her favorites. They rest on the neighboring bench.

“If I’ve told him once I’ve told him a thousand times. Everyone is born with problems, raised by the necessity to face them, and in the end betrayed by his own tragic flaws. It is how you play the cards you’re dealt that makes all the difference.”

“Born with problems? He’s Han Solo’s son _and_ your nephew! He was born to be brilliant. What could he possibly know about struggle?” Rey snaps out bitterly. She’s tired of hearing how prodigious Ben is; they can’t all be born Skywalkers.

“Then tell me, Miss _Kenobi_ , what is in a name exactly when a rose by any other would smell just as sweet?” When he replies, she wonders in a cold sweat whether he can read her mind or not. It’s never been mentioned in her classes, so she reassures herself that it’s merely a trick of his wisdom.  
  
“Always judge a man not by the life he was born into, but by the one he’s created,” Grandmaster Skywalker plucks one of the unopened buds off the shrub, absently investigating the thorns along the stem after he speaks.

Rey considers the fact that despite all the rumors that circle about, she really knows nothing at all about Ben. The idea frightens her a bit. Perhaps Grandmaster Skywalker has a point. Well, of course he has a point. A man like that doesn’t exactly speak to fill a room with his own hot air.  
  
Rey should learn to let go of what other people think of Ben, and make her own opinions. Despite what the others say and her own bristling feelings towards him, she can’t bring it to herself to say she that hates him, or even dislikes him.  
  
In fact, if she’s willing to admit it to herself, the situation is quite the opposite. Sure he might be brooding, cocky, and a real pain in the ass but her days would be utterly dry without their increasingly amicable banter. His presence in The Force, what she once found grating and intolerable, now thrums harmonically against her own in a purring rhythm. She finds that she can pick him out from anywhere in the island now from his complimentary biorhythm, a constructive interference pattern melding to her own. A corner of her instinct she now recognizes to be the call of The Force gravitates her in his direction despite her resistance to it.

And fine he’s not entirely unattractive either. But sitting next to Grandmaster Skywalker whom she is still not entirely convinced is not a mind reader is neither the time nor the place to confront these mounting pressures.

“The padawan trials are coming up, are you nervous?” He looks up at her earnestly when he ends the impasse.

“Of course,” Rey silently thanks him for summoning her from her dangerous thoughts.

“Hah! Don’t be. Ben doesn’t take padawan learners, so you’ll dodge that bullet if that’s what has you so wound tight,” He laughs when he says it, but a part of it sounds forced.

“Oh,” Rey feels her stomach drop in disappointment for a reason she can’t even explain. She should be relieved, but she isn’t. As if he can sense it, Grandmaster Skywalker heaves a heavy sign and answers her unspoken question.

“It seems he doesn’t see the value in company and mentorship. It’s been five years since he faced the trials and took the title of Master, and he has never trained anyone. Breaks my heart, really. I try to make light of the situation, I tease him and call him my padawan learner still all the time. It’s a trivial effort; there’s never been any getting through to him once his mind has been made up. The boy is brilliant—driven, despite his flaws. But so are you, child. Why I’d take you on as my apprentice if I had the time!” He starts laughing to lighten the mood.

“I don’t think I will be picked, honestly. I’m just too old. But that’s okay, I will learn to be a Jedi on my own, in the continuing education classes,” Rey tries not to sound too unsure of herself in the presence of the Grandmaster, but doesn’t see a point in lying to him when he will see the truth for himself soon enough.

“Hah! You sound just like Ben. Always thinking he needed to do things on his own, without anyone’s support. You know, he was twenty when he became my apprentice.”

“Really?”

“Really. While it is always best to believe in one’s self, a little help from others can be a great blessing. There is nothing wrong with letting the people who love you, help you. Not that I love you, I just met you!” Grandmaster Luke smiles encouragingly and Rey lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding and yields a chuckle before he goes on.

“Work hard, be yourself, and any master would be lucky to have you,” He grazes his fingers over the bud in his hand and Rey eyes the soft green petals, mesmerized as they unfurl before her eyes. “The flowers that bloom the latest are often the most beautiful.”  
  
“Thank you, Grandmaster Skywalker.”

“Call me Luke.”


	8. Tides

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 years later: I'm back on my bullshit

 

Ben is everywhere that Rey is.    
  
The harmonic resonance of his thrumming presence in The Force becomes a constant murmur at the edges of her awareness, and it seems that he’s never too far away to feel. At first she strains against it, like a pebble lodged in her shoe. Now, she accepts it as standard, the way she accepts the sound of her own breathing, as though without it she’d feel departed.    


It’s not as though they speak, and it’s not as though they actively acknowledge each other’s presence. One just happens by some habitual stroke of serendipity to catch the other in all the same places.    
  
If Rey decides to train on the temple floor, then Ben seems to have been one step ahead of her, running forms between the crumbling pillars before she even arrives.    
  
If Rey is meditating under the cragged limestone alcoves facing the sea on the distant northern shores of the island, then within the hour Ben will certainly stroll past casually, looking to claim the spot himself for the afternoon.

She isn’t certain who is the first to begin eating in the courtyard gardens instead of the mess hall, but now she spies him daily out of the corner of her eye from her spot beneath the shady awning, a mere stone’s throw away in his assigned spot amongst some animated orange blossoms native to the Naboo.    
  
The first few incidents are written off as coincidence. The next, the inspiration for artless apology and accusation. Now, their proximity is commonplace—comfortable and routine.    
  
Rey finds she doesn’t mind as much as she should; it’s not as though they’re  _ together, _ although she knows they aren’t exactly  _ apart _ , either. If Ben is nearby, no one else dares wander close. It seems Rey is the sole temple citizen not wary of the presence of the beast, which leaves the two of them in mutually embraced solitude. They’ve resolved to an unspoken truce. 

Today, a warm afternoon breeze carries over the island’s emerald hills when Rey is wandering over the highland ridgeline beyond the temple, thoughts distant in a sort of wandering meditation. She opens her eyes when she hears the cracking of wood against wood, the familiar clash of sparring swords from the terrace below.    
  
It’s Ben. She should have known that she was bound to stumble upon him sooner or later since she hadn’t had any run-ins with him yet today. Some objective force between them that is beyond her control or understanding—or desire, for that matter—stretches taught like a rubber band, constantly straining to return to its natural shape and only satisfied when she’s near him once again. 

What’s unusual about this particular close encounter is that he’s not alone. He’s sparring with one of the other Knights, transfixed in his relentless onslaught on his opponent. If he feels her presence perched up on the high terrace rocks, it doesn’t break his focus in the slightest.    
  
His opponent heaves a hard breath, regaining his footing after Ben wails on him with a particularly imposing blow, but he never surrenders the cagey grin on his face. His hair is a mousey brown color, cropped close to his head but not close enough to mask his cowlick part. Ben’s frame is uniquely striking next to his, towering over him in height and bulk. That’s not to say the other Knight—Master Kuiper Rengé, she recalls—has a modest figure by any stretch of the imagination. Ben simply affects an acutely threatening disposition. 

Rengé’s apprentice, Klaes, sits cross-legged on the gravelly earth a safe distance away from the fighting with a flimsy in his hands, fingers running over its surface to fastidiously record something unseen while occasionally squinting up at the match through his thick, tilt-shift lenses. He’s got another set of what looks like spectrum-restrictive goggles around his neck and some highly bastardized set of quadnocs hanging off a strap slung over his shoulder.    
  
Rey wonders what utility such an array of visual aids could possibly serve on a daily basis, unless he genuinely needs them to see, but she’s not entirely convinced. It’s plausible, though; his massive, expressive ears are his defining feature, stretching up off his almost transparently pale-skinned head like those on a jackrab, only pointed instead of floppy. Rey has little experience with near-human species, but she deduces his ancestral homeworld was likely dark. The Red Nebula? Perhaps, but his features are far too soft for that. An interspecies mix, then. Rey smiles inwardly at the beauty the Resistance brings to the Galaxy. 

“Remise!” Klaes fusses with his array of optics as he calls out to the duelists. “Rengé loses right of way, point yields to Solo. The score is now thirteen to two with Solo still decisively leading. Master, it might behoove you to watch your right flank. He’s gotten you four times with that feint and right wrist point move, are you looking to lose a hand?”

“Would you please…” Pant. “Cut it out…” Pant. “With the damned statistical analysis…” Pant. “You fucking holoworm!” His master groans as he and Ben line up to begin the next point. It’s funny to Rey to see the habitually outspoken and cavalier Knight so out of his element. She can’t imagine how someone as cogent and objective as Klaes got picked up as Rengé’s apprentice.    
  
“Don’t harp on him, you’re the one who wanted to spar by the old republican decorum,” Ben’s face is hidden from her but she can feel his smugness oozing in his voice without the help of The Force. He spins his wooden saber with a casual flourish before finding a comfortable grip on its hilt again. 

“Yeah, I did. Just not with you,” Rengé means it as a compliment to his skill, but the backhanded bitterness causes Ben a little pang and Rey catches it as a byproduct of their synchronicity. 

“Sorry to disappoint,” Ben plays off the exchange with a casual lilt, but goads the other Knight as a passive aggressive payback. “Maybe you’d fair better in a  _ real _ fight? Or maybe you’d rather me take another handicap? A hand behind my back this time?”

“Alright you arrogant, nerf-herding prick, let’s go! You and me right now, to first blood! No rules, no holds barred,” Rey might not be an enthusiast like some of the other padawans when it comes to watching the Knights’ sparring matches, but she’s seen enough of Ben’s to know Rengé is digging his own grave. 

“Master, be advised. According to prior outcomes and conditional statistics, your odds of beating Master Solo in a freestyle match are approximately 874 to 1,” Klaes supplies unhelpfully from the sidelines.

“Your own apprentice does my trash talking for me,” Ben snickers. 

“Klaes,” Rengé groans. “You’re worse than a broken protocol droid, you know that?”

“Understood, Master. Interpersonal honesty parameters lowered to 75%” His sarcasm earns him another unamused glare. 

Rengé draws his blade and the match begins. 

He comes reeling at Ben without much of a setup at all but levels into a distinctive rhythm and Rey tries to fish through her mind for the name of the form he’s employing because she really ought to know these things by now but frankly she couldn’t care less. Rey is more of a make it up as she goes along kind of girl. 

Ben seems to adhere to a similar dogma as he haphazardly deflects the strikes of his opponent with broad swings of his saber. He moves over the terrace with fully-weighted, wide-arching strokes, carrying his body in crashing waves of reckless abandon at the other Knight. He has no concern for avoiding injury and pulls some pretty risky moves, occasionally even turning his back on his opponent to build momentum behind a heavy stroke. 

What he lacks in regimented style he makes up for in blind passion, and Ben is rewarded with the first blow mere seconds into their match. 

Rengé keels over, clutching his gut and Rey wonders to herself if maybe he’s going to vomit. But, bull-headed as all these damned Knights seem to be, he drags himself out of his sagging posture to square off with Ben once again.    
  
He spits in the dirt. No red hue. Yet. Ben is honorable enough to give him a moment to catch his breath, and the fight begins again. 

Now that Rengé has a bit of a crutch, the fight begins to devolve rapidly from a reasonably even match as far as sparring with Ben goes to an all-out slaughterhouse. He moves with an exacting vengeance, each blow he hews against his opponent’s defenses more vigorous than the last. Ben is the only one Rey has ever heard who cries out when he strikes, as though some wild beast within his chest needs to be set free as his source of inner strength.    
  
When his challenger’s arms are finally incapable of rising to block yet another savage blow, Ben clocks him in the cheek with the hilt of the wooden saber. It’ll leave a hideous mark for the next week, but it’ll heal quicker than some internal bleeding that would have been incurred had he followed through with the stroke as intended. It’s a coup-de-grâce, really.

In all actuality, there’s no contest. The match was over before it even began. 

* * *

 

That night is a double full moon, and thus a rare double spring tide as well, the twin moons of Ahch-To working in tandem with the gravity of their soft blue sun to coax out the lowest of low tides. The aquatic world is aglow with the opalescent rays of moon and starlight, and Rey is invariably astounded, borne back ceaselessly to the shoreline every time one such night arrives.    
  
Before her arrival on this drifting marble blessed with the gift of endless water, she had never fathomed that nature could be beautiful instead of murderous. The desert was a hell scape, but Ben constantly warns her that despite their magnificence the seas can be dangerous, too. Rey hates when he laces her favorite things with his permeating bitterness. 

Tonight, though, the waves hang back, gently kissing the soft grey sands where they usually crash high upon the cliffs. It’s infrequent the tides draw low enough for Rey to actually explore the beaches and she doesn’t want to pass up the familiar feel of sand between her toes simply because she’s too busy to be bothered to walk to the shore. 

Normally she would take off some of her robes, but the air is decidedly brisk tonight with the breezes carrying off the water. Even in the summer, the island’s temperature seems to drop heavily when darkness settles over her personal corner of Ahch-To. Instead she settles for discarding her boots at the top of a flight of stone stairs usually obscured by the high tides and races down with tiny, padding feet to the water. 

She buries her feet in the sands, then her hands, and finally succumbs to collapsing in it, closing her eyes and willing away her irrational homesickness for the only home she’s even known. There are things to be missed in even the most abusive of climates, she contests with herself. 

  
It’s been nearly six standard months since her arrival, with another six humid standard months of the summer cycle still to pass here on Ahch-To. Time seems to flow so idly deliberate in this system, the seasons crawling towards change at a belaboring pace as the rocky sphere of her new home races around the Class B main sequence star that rules the system. Sigma Piso-b is not at all unique in her make-up when compared to the near hundred billion stars of the Galaxy, but she astounds Rey.  

Burning with over ten thousand times the luminosity and a dozen times the size of the sun she knew as a child, Rey struggles to convince herself this star is anything like the one she knew at home. On Jakku, the sun torched with insatiable ire overhead, casting a subtle red glow over her world and snuffing the life out of everything he touched for too long a time, leaving the surface void of water and inhospitable anyplace but near the poles.    
  
But here, under the gentle cast of her new mother, Rey feels for the first time that perhaps the warmth from a star can be better than the cold and empty fingers of space. Her soft blue-white light breathes life into this distant exoplanet, as though her fusion and gravitation were some physical manifestation of The Force itself.    
  
When their ship had first arrived in the Piso System, Rey had theorized that perhaps the planets here were cool and wet and more hospitable than hers because the blue star seemed colder than the flaming red orb that faded to a blip when they left her home world. The two seemed to be so different to her then, like fire and ice, the barer of destruction and the barer of life. 

Ben had been the one to explain to her that both stars drew from the same source of power and despite the flaming red corona and desert climate on Jakku, Sigma Piso-b was actually the hotter, more brilliant star. The mild climate on Ahch-To was due primarily to its orbital distance and the composition of its atmosphere, not the star itself. 

The color, he explained, was indicative of the chemical make-up of the star—the bloody red being spectral signal of predominately hydrogen fusion, and the blue corresponding to high levels of neutral helium. Interestingly enough, this same phenomenon accounted for the colors of different lightsabers. The impurities in the kyber crystals fluoresce when excited by the harmonic resonance of the crystal with the force, coloring the plasma beam. A flawless kyber crystal would yield a pure white beam, just like the hottest and brightest stars.  

In her few idle hours, Rey’s mind brews invariably with questions about her newfound universe, just like these. Her hungry curiosities keep her awake through the quiet hours of the night, tossing and turning, body exhausted but her mind always restless.    
  
Not just gnawing on questions about the unimaginable vastness of the world around her, but about why all her trains of thought wandered their way back to Ben, as they had just now. Despite her best efforts, thoughts of him bleed in from some mental archive of memories she didn’t remember ordering her mind to keep. 

At first, she had only filed away a few absent images in the random access part of her memory: his sharp features and nervous temper that made her wary of him on Jakku. His name, his relationship to the old man, his serpent’s tongue. He was a transient feature, to be gauged for danger and advantage. Nothing more. 

Rey’d like to believe the archival committals to her long-term memory began in the instant she watched him ignite the saber, in the moments before their imminent demise. She’d like to believe that, but it wouldn’t be true. 

No her first sticky, unforgettable memory of him is from their night spent in her AT-AT. She bolts up with a start, expecting the worst before she comes to her senses and realizes Ben is the source of the pitiful whines that woke her. It doesn’t do much to dull her aching sense that something isn’t right. A chewing anxiety and despair raises in her throat, making it hard to swallow. The feeling seems to have no root, as though it were leaking in from the outside. Her memory comes to her in black and white, in only the dim light of the stars drifting through the old windshield. Ben is writhing on the floor, hands clutching desperately to his robes as he curls up into the fetal position against the stinging cold of the metal hull. She can’t say for certain since the shadows partially eclipse his face, but he seems to be crying in his sleep. What was once a dripping leak in her mind feels now like a flood and in all her years of solitude on Jakku Rey has never felt a gripping loneliness the way she does in this moment. She leaves him with the woolen blanket and resolves not to bring it up in the morning. 

It is after this incident that all her memories of Ben become crystalline and vivid, etched in on some permanent partition she’s unsure she can ever fully wipe clean. Even now, months later and as hard as she’s tried to overwrite the memory, she recalls in perfect detail the smell of him when she was clinging to his chest, dangling precariously from the hull of the Corellian blockader. It is some rank bouquet of petrol tar, the metallic iron of blood, a salty amassment of desert sweat, a piquant whiff of foreign spices, and some indecipherable and captivating fifth element that can only be described as characteristically Ben. It’s fetid but it’s raw and she wants to hate it—and half of her does—but the other half can’t help but pine to meet it again somewhere. 

In the months following her arrival at the temple, she commits their countless episodes of banter to a holo-record in her memory until Ben’s voice, coarse and low, comes to her mind like a narrator as she trains. She learns there lies a vast sea of hideous, unfounded rumors circulating the compound about him, and at first Rey doesn’t question their validity. But in the quiet of their small encounters she peels back the myth of the man from the truth. It gives her a guilty feeling.   
  
Nothing stops him from training, neither the blistering noontime heat nor the whipping clash of the tropical monsoons. She must catch him dozens of times in frustrated meditation, marking all her favorite remote corners of the island with the residual burn of his presence. She catches him in passing in the temple corridors during the feral hours of the night and the straining refrain of the dawn, when it seems every soul is asleep but them. He’s everywhere she goes and nowhere at the same time, his dedication to his craft a mirror to her own.

Rey realizes something in a moment of clarity in the midst one of her more infuriating form running routines—Ben isn’t good at this. Not if he has to work with the same pace she does just to keep up and stay ahead of the other knights.

  
_ Always judge a man not by the life he was born into, but by the one he’s created. _

Maybe they aren’t so different after all.    
  
Slowly, where her small world she’d fashioned at the temple had once been void of permanent people, now she finds Ben conveniently lurking in the most mundane of places. They rarely even meet eyes and only a handful of times have they talked to one another. In a paradox of comfortable, mutual solitude, Rey is casually aware of the vacant humming that always passes between them. Like all living things, his presence casts ripples into The Force around him, like pebbles dropping upon the glassy surface of a pond.    
  
When she first learned to open herself to The Force the feeling grated her, juxtaposed against the rhythm of her own thrumming life force. On their journey to Ahch-To, his aura in The Force, as blazing and unstable as he is, made it impossible for her to perform meditations. That was until she began to feel the presences of other people and things, not only a different rhythm but dissonant and interfering destructively with her own. Not so with Ben. The feeling grows on her and his mind purrs continually in her peripheral, the higher, jittery harmonic a resonant compliment to her calm one. Now in the quiet of her focus she catches herself searching The Force for its distant, erratic trill.

Some dissenting faction of her logical reasoning proposes the notion that this is what it means to breed affection for someone. Not in the abstract sense of longing that Rey had constructed for her imagined family on Jakku, or in the infatuated sense of the jumping static charges of lust that erupted after running into him half naked in the halls by the bath house, no that wasn’t it in the slightest. 

Not that, but attraction in the fundamental, underlying, gravitational sense. Attraction in the sense that all sapient species hunger blindly for companionship out of the fear of being truly alone. The same powerful motive force that drove the first species to invent interstellar travel and turn their eyes skyward with hope.    
  
Attraction not necessary for completion, but for compliment. The way words could amplify meaning when they rhymed to create new understanding. And Force, Rey thinks suddenly, how frequently people underestimate the eroticism of being understood. 

Attraction in the sense that Rey wants absolutely no part in it, but she is a part of a universe governed by some physical laws that cannot be broken. Rey considers, then, that perhaps gravity is not a poor analogy for the fundamentality of The Force—shaping a world of no coincidence and aligning the moves of some chaotic pazaak game where she and Ben were always destined to meet despite time or space or reason, drifting together through the void like two marbles in a perfect vacuum.    
  
Lying in the sands listening to the pulse of the waves lapping at her feet, she lays out the separate pieces of Ben in her mind’s eye and constructs a proper portrait of her feelings for him. Rey admits to herself, finally, what it is exactly that has her so afraid to face the trials. 

 

She’s afraid that when she arrives, Ben won’t be there. 


End file.
